Routine plot, average acting, bad cinematography, historically inaccurate

Rating: 3/10 (15 January 2016)

The plot is a routine revenge story. A guy gets mistreated. His son is murdered. He overcomes obstacles and gets even. Yawn.
A routine plot is turned into a ridiculous one by the small events throughout. The movie opens with a bunch of hunters wading through the Everglades, except that it is somewhere in the northern Rocky Mountains. Or at least is supposed to be, though I don't know where one would find Everglades-like water amongst the pine trees anywhere in the Rockies (where I have done extensive backpacking). This fascination with people wading or swimming in frigid mountain water in winter pervades the movie, showing up again and again. I've waded in that water. It is COLD. My wife used to call it "screaming cold." Yet in this movie people flop into the water, get completely soaked, and then just walk away as if nothing happened. In reality they would very shortly freeze to death and become encased in ice. Floating down the river while fully clothed, including being wrapped in a bear skin as in one scene, would drown you in no time.
The scene shifts back and forth between the Great Plains and the Rocky Mountains. Start in the mountains, move to the plains, go back into the mountains (why?), back to the plains.
The acting is competent but nothing special. DeCaprio's acting mostly consists of grunts because after the bear mauling he cannot talk right until near the end of the movie. I can do that. Do I get an Oscar? Over and over we are treated to interruptions of the action for scenes of nature, especially views of the tops of trees from the bases of those trees. Is that supposed to mean something? It interrupts the story for no obvious reason.
There are these Indians around, looking for our hero and his friends to attack them. The Indians are "Rees," i.e., Arikaree or Arikara. The problem is that those Indians lived in North Dakota, not in the Rocky Mountains and certainly nowhere near the Yellowstone.
This show is just another ho-hum Hollywood mangling of history. The characters are uninteresting and flat. The acting does nothing to make the characters more than that. The plot is predictable except where it is so silly as to be hard to imagine. Overall the show is mildly entertaining if you are bored and don't have anything else to occupy your time.