Wind River

Wind River (2017) begins strong, a glimpse of people and a place that we might not otherwise know -- the Arapaho on the Wind River reservation, an enclave of poverty and hopelessness occupying one of the most spectacular wilderness areas on earth.  The plot is familiar to the point of cliché -- a lonely, divorced game warden discovers a woman's corpse in the remote mountains near Lander.  The dead woman, actually an 18 year old girl, was a friend of his daughter who was, herself, murdered a couple of years previously.  The game warden (Jeremy Renner) is a man who specializes in using a high-powered rifle to kill "predators" -- literally, in this film, wolves and mountain lions, but, of course, later, human beings who fit that description.  Since the killing occurred on Federal land, the Indian Reservation, the FBI is called.  The Bureau sends a winsome, naïve young woman to lead the investigation -- Agent Banner played by Elizabeth Olson.  Banner forges an unlikely alliance with the embittered and despairing game warden to solve the mystery involving the dead girl and bring the predatory perpetrators to justice.  This is all very, very standard stuff but enlivened by the location shooting on the reservation, the Wyoming landscapes, and the periodic snowstorms and blizzards -- it's a very cold movie and the acting is uniformly excellent.  (Curiously, the film's premise -- a dead girl found near a small and rural Western community -- is the same as that of Twin Peaks and, in fact, there are resemblances that go beyond the bare premise:  there's some suggestion that the bored teenage girls in the remote town are willing to take unreasonable risks with older men.)

But it's ultimately pretty hard to correct for stupid, and, unfortunately, the movie takes a bad turn after about thirty minutes.  It turns out that the bad guys are security guards protecting an oil-drilling rig.  The oil drilling rig is in the exact middle of nowhere and, so, it's a little puzzling that a half-dozen heavily armed dudes (some of them with machine guns) have to be stationed there in trailer houses to protect the place.  (Protect it against whom?)  The film devolves into a standard revenge drama involving big, spectacular Tarantino-style stand-offs between the FBI agent, the local Sheriff's department, the Indian police, and the well-armed security guards.  These are the kind of shoot-outs in which everyone has to be killed two or three times, at least, for maximum violence -- everyone gets shot repeatedly.  In a bizarre turn of events, the hero has decided to not attend the slaughter-fest at the oil rig -- instead, he's opted to track a mountain lioness to her lair.  Of course, her lair is located a few thousand feet from the OK corral-style shootout at the oil rig and, so, he can come to the rescue with his hunting rifle and deliver the coup de grace to a couple bad guys who just refuse to stay dead.  Poor Agent Banner has been shot at close-range with a shot-gun blast to the chest.  As she's bleeding to death, the hero procures her permission to leave her weltering in gore and go off on a solo punitive man-hunt against the worst of the bad guys.  Instead of helping the wounded FBI agent, the hero spends his time torturing to death the chief bad guy, a massive undertaking since it involves capturing the guy, mutilating him, and, then, driving by snowmobile up to the snowfields under Gannett Peak, Wyoming's highest mountain for the final torture-murder.   (The measure of merit in this idiotic film is one's ability to run barefoot through snow and ice in subzero temperatures -- the chief bad guy fails this test while the poor dead girl whose discovery triggers the film's mystery story ran for "six miles" until her lungs froze and she died of "frozen alveoli."  -- I have my doubts about this medical condition which seems to me to be invented for the movie.)  Of course, it turns out that the lady FBI agent was wearing a bullet-proof vest and she will pull through.  There's some gibberish spoken about grieving and the movie, which has regaled us with a wholly gratuitous and brutal rape scene, ends on a pious note, advising by title that no one keeps track of native women who go missing and that there is an epidemic of their disappearances.  The picture is vulgar and nasty -- there's no reason to stage the rape, but, I suppose, we need motivation to cheer on the hero's torture and murder of the bad guy.  The hero has taken care to get the FBI agent's consent to this torture-murder and so, I suppose, all is supposed to be well, but, in fact, it's a reprehensible climax to a movie deadened by gross stupidity during its last hour. 

Normally, in a film like this, a connection would be forged between the death of the hero's daughter (she was half-Indian and presumably killed by Caucasian bad actors in a place called Pinedale) and the death of the girl that prompts the detective narrative in this film.  But no connection is made -- the point being that native women are, I suppose, just randomly killed and no one cares about their slaughter.  This meretricious nonsense was financed in part by the Tunica - Biloxi Tribe in Louisiana.