Hard to Rate

Rating: 3/10 (30 July 2016)

I started reading reviews of this movie, but I decided to stop and just give my honest opinion before I'm influenced too much by the occasionally very impassioned arguments for and against this film on this site. I watched through to the end, so that's a plus--so many movies don't hold my attention. The acting is mesmeric--I couldn't take my eyes off Samuel L Jackson for the whole thing; he quite steals the entire movie for me. The dialogue is amusingly weird. There are some very anachronistic moments, however--like the New Zealand actress right in the middle with her bizarre Kiwi accent (err... wouldn't have had one in the mid-1800) doing a bad Calamity Jane impression. But overall I think this film would probably have been better not made. Violence, hate and evil shouldn't be glorified. Don't get me wrong, I love gory, violent movies. But I like my entertainment to have a moral core, a sense of right from which evil deviates. That doesn't exist in this film No one is the fixed point of the compass from which you can judge the events and weigh them in the cosmic balance. This is hell. This is mankind without any possible redemption. This is a vision of the world so bleak that I, personally, don't want any part of it. It's pornographic violence. Dress it up how you like with fancy dialogue and amusing actors (Walton Goggins also steals this movie), this is still pornography. I'm giving the movie three stars because the wrapping was out of this world. Pity the present inside was so corrupt.