Its good - but VERY clichéd under its veil of self-importance

Rating: 6/10 (21 August 2017)

Wind River almost suffocates under the weight of its self-importance - characters mumbling, most lines being a little over-cooked in their meaning, characters seeming a bit too contrived and self- conscious, a context that keeps throwing its metaphor at you.
But once you cut through all that, you'll find a very clichéd, often sexist genre film complete with a moody, understated male hero, a rookie female FBI agent who basically looks pretty and needs rescuing, a couple of action scenes that feel a bit like random missions from GTAV (with plenty of characters that you have only just met getting arbitrarily killed).
The main flaw of the film for me is the presence of a flash-back which ultimately shouldn't be necessary, but seems completely relied upon for audience satisfaction when it comes to a villain's denouement. The villains here have no depth or causality, they exist simply as villains to further the story, but perhaps that's where the unfair treatment of native Americans comes in again.
Its good - worth seeing even - but if you've seen The Grey (Neeson's character specifically), Insomnia and The Valley of Elah, your recognition neurons will be fairly active.