The Meh-venant (aka I was rooting for the bear)

rev·e·nant
noun
a person who has returned, especially supposedly from the dead.

Yeah yeah, I know - this will no doubt make me about as popular as a fart in an oxygen tent, but fucking sue me. I'm not really into these big, brawny, hairy, glistening, two-fisted, Manly Man against Nature, pseudo-Shakespearean sweaty-balled, mythological He Films. It just ain't my thing. Maybe because I'm female - not ruling out that possibility. So perhaps I am not at all qualified to review The Revenant, starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Tom Hardy and a bear. But it's getting so much Oscar Buzz that one cannot help but inhale the contact high and hope for the best. So I watched it.

Black Robe, 1991

And was underwhelmed.
Don't worry, this will be a short review.
I'm pretty much just going to point out the things I didn't like about it.

I've already seen this movie, not once but three times. The first time, it was going by the title Gladiator. Impossibly godlike good man unjustly loses wife and son and attains hero status by seeking his vengeance, even though he's kind of an asshole really.

The second time I saw it, it was Black Robe. Canadian Indian pilgrimy forest saga with dream visions and arrows through the throat and the scalpings and white guys shagging hot Indian princesses and gruesome blood splattered death and stuff.

Valhalla Rising, 2009

Finally, it showed up toting itself as Valhalla Rising, a good, long mead horn crammed full of distorted hallucinations, Indians, more horrible rapes and deaths and muddy guys getting bloody and bloody guys getting muddy and smelly animal skins and Vikings boxing, yeahyeahyeah.

I liked Gladiator.
I hated Black Robe.
I loved Valhalla Rising.
And so here I am, totally MEH over The Revenant.
Like Celie said: "It be's like that sometimes."

I could not understand a single fucking word that Tom Hardy said. Maybe he needed more time to extract himself from the mumbly, twitchy Mad Max shell before taking on this role, I dunno.

I like Tom Hardy. I could have dealt with the mushmouthedness of his Hairy Crazy White Guy if I had even a molecular sized scrap of like for Leo DiCaprio. But I don't. Never have. Not saying the guy lacks talent, because he doesn't. I've just never been a fan.

I'm really really really really fucking sick of seeing Hairy Stinky 1800 era Lumberjacks win the love of the hottest Indian Babe in a Buckskin Bikini and simultaneously earn the respect of even the oldest and most wisest pipe-smoking Medicine Man ever to shapeshift into an eagle. Bull. Shit. White guys were all pretty much cockroaches back then, lets be real. (shit, most of them still are) Cut the Little Big Man/Thunderheart shit already. They didn't want us here, and we pretty much fucked everything up. No white hunter/trapper who lived before the age of the underarm deoderant had a valid Native-esque dreamquest or an honorary Limbos With Farm Animals name. Shit all over that nonsense.

And yeah, I was rooting for the bear.

Look, she had cubs. And she was there first. Get your dumb honky ass outta the fricken woods, Jethro.

And also yeah, I probably was the only person singing to myself at the point where Leo reunites with his dead son via a dead Indian hottie in a euphoric snow-globe dream: "Touched by an Angel, Fucked by a Bear!"

I be's like that sometimes.

But hey, go ahead and give Leo an Oscar. I don't give a shit.