Bummer. Pointless but pretty.

Rating: 5/10 (15 January 2016)

Beautiful in a self-conscious way, but often tedious. Aside from occasional moments of elevated humanity, it's mostly an overlong, gruesome spectacle of cruelty, pain and anguish, which after a while becomes almost comic in the unrelenting and extreme nature of the main character's ordeals (and the implausibility of him surviving them). Aside from a moment when DiCaprio's character gains insight into the pointlessness of his behavior, this is an unexceptional survival and revenge story gussied up by how-did-they-do-that? cinematography, portentous music, and a performance that screams "Look what I went through to get my Oscar!" I didn't believe any of it for a minute.