Gut-churning, but thrilling and masterfully executed.

Rating: 8/10 (9 October 2005)

As there are already many excellent, detailed, and comprehensive comments on this film, mine shall have in the main a more general approach. North America (not including Mexico), to a much greater extent than South America, really doesn't have all that much history when compared with practically anywhere else apart from the antipodes. My apologies to my American (USA) and Anzac cousins, but this is a fact. That is why we see the same chunks of American history recycled again and again, with a great many contradictions from film to film. (Though why they don't exploit the two wars with Britain long after the War of Independence I have never understood, especially since neither of them could really be considered an American defeat). One can understand, however, why movie-makers had up to now kept the wraps on, or swept under the carpet, this particular piece of history. Though doubtlessly exaggerated but true in essence, this movie shows us a vast panorama of a variegated and divided community, who like rival colonies of ants slaughter one another to take sole possession of a disputed ant-hill. I cannot recall a more brutal and callous struggle for the survival of the fittest ever shown on such a large scale on the screen that wasn't a bona fide war-film. And, mark you, the combatants, male and female, are, except right at the end, exclusively civilians. Here we see all the prejudices, hatred, megalomania, corruption and cupidity that still, to some extent, vitiate American society even up to this day, and which are the cause of such conflicts. And all this mayhem occurs among inhabitants of that hub of civilisation, the Big Apple, when one would be less surprised if it were taking place among the head-hunters of Borneo in the depths of the primaeval forest(my apologies also to any Bornean headhunters who happen to read this piece). I can quite understand others avoiding or heartily disliking this film, because it certainly isn't suitable fare for the squeamish, and shows ,as I have said, the ugly side of American society that some would prefer to forget. Daniel Day-Lewis is convincingly multi-facetted and gives a superlative performance. How this bloodthirsty bully and the last of the Mohicans can possibly be being portrayed by the same actor staggers the imagination. Di Caprio gives a fairly convincing performance as a young vendetta-seeker, which is certainly stronger than that of "Titanic" when he refused to turn blue despite his long sojourn in the icy waters of the North Atlantic.( Perhaps such a hue would have rendered him less romantic, though it did a lot for Mel Gibson in "Braveheart"! ). Liam Neeson does a short but competent job as a harsh but loving father and a bold and chivalrous skirmisher. By the way, the nasty-looking assortment of weapons used to gouge, slash, and disembowel adds much verisimilitude to the slaughter, before which the "rumbles" in "West Side Story" pale into insignificance. Cameron Diaz makes a convincing pickpocket, and does her best work since the very different rôle in "Very Bad Things". She manages to look much more attractive than usual, so how Leonardo manages to resist her feminine charms after being locked up in a religiositous reformatory for sixteen years is difficult to understand. The camera work is fantastic: the scene where we get a "de-zooming" bird's eye view of the opposing warrior bands in the snow is like a painting of Hell by the Dutch renaissance artist Hieronymus Bosch! One thing puzzles me though, which must be the fault of the scriptwriter: how can Bill the Butcher be so incredibly accurate in his knife-throwing when he has no depth vision for lack of one eye? Unfortunately, I saw this film dubbed into Spanish, which, although I understood everything that was said, and the dubbing here is probably the best in the world, much may have got lost in translation, and, of course, I was deprived of the timbre of the actors' real voices and the variety of accents and dialects (all were speaking flawless Castilian)and, possibly, Anglo-Saxon curses, which must have figured prominently in the original dialogue. Had I seen it in the English-language version, I would most likely have given it a nine or ten instead of an eight.