Beautiful movie, lengthy, definitely not Leo's strongest performance

Rating: 7/10 (27 January 2016)

I have to say "The Revenant" was a breathtaking movie. The scenery is beautiful, the direction is on point, the actors are doing a very good job.
However, I was personally expecting more from the movie, especially as it had been acclaimed by the critics before its release. First of all, it felt like the picture was unusefully long to tell the story Inarritu wanted to tell (2h40). This resulted in a lot of lengthy and quite uneventful bits. Secondly, while Leonardo DiCaprio does an outstanding job (he is one of the best actors of his generation), I did not think he was really given the room to perform to his usual standard at all. Hugh Glass is an interesting character but I had the feeling the character fell flat during the movie: his back-story is interesting but wasn't exactly well developed in my opinion (the flashbacks weren't always very clear). Glass has very few interactions with other characters and it felt like the chemistry didn't work even between Glass and Hawk or Glass and his wife. The only real connection he seemed to have was with Fitzgerald but I can only assume it is because Tom Hardy was doing a remarkable job. Thridly, this wasn't Leonardo's best performance in my book. He is an outstanding actor, but it felt Tom Hardy stole the show with his impression of Fitzgerald. In comparison, the character of Glass was overall less charismatic and too smooth and good to be believable.
Overall, I really enjoyed the movie, but I was expecting that little "something special" that would make it one of the best pictures I had ever seen and it didn't come.