I’m not a big fan of Leo’s. Maybe I’ve just chosen the wrong titles, but I’ve never thought he had the range for many of the roles he plays. He always seems so one-note. He’s good here, but once again, it’s one note: angry. To be fair, he has to make do with very little dialogue, about half of it in the Pawnee dialect, which he uses to converse with Hawk, his son by a Pawnee woman. And he has plenty of reason to be angry.

Anything lacking in Leo’s performance is more than made up for by Tom Hardy’s. He takes on the role of John Fitzgerald, the greedy trapper who leaves scout Hugh Glass (DiCaprio) for dead after a bear attack, becoming the target for Glass’s revenge for the remainder of the film. It’s a meaty, if unappealing, character, and Hardy handles it, as usual, with aplomb.

It’s beautifully shot by director Alejandro G. Innarritu, (although I wish he would keep the camera still once in a while, but it worked for him in Birdman, so what do I know?), and peppered with symbolic visions and daydreams. And, of course, its setting is breathtaking, even viewed in the bleak, washed-out palate Innarritu uses. But for all its beauty, there didn’t seem to be much “there” there. I don’t have anything against those films whose plots can be summed up completely in a sentence or two. Sometimes they can end up being surprisingly complex films. But this simple revenge/chase film doesn’t have much going for it besides its looks. And even then, there were two scenes that took me right out of the story—a not-quite-good-enough CGI bear, and a scene borrowed from The Empire Strikes Back, which was tough to swallow then, and even more so here.

There was one particularly great moment, though, near the beginning, where a battle between the trappers and local Native Americans is covered in the style of Linklater’s Slacker—we move from one participant in the skirmish to another in a seamless, dizzying, headlong rush. It really is a great sequence, but as sometimes happens, I found myself so enamored of the technique that I stopped paying attention to the story. Which, I guess, is a good way of summing up my feelings about the film: I didn’t really love what Innarritu did, but HOW he did it sure was purty.

IMDB currently lists it at a 8.0, which I find much too high. I’d put it somewhere in the 6.5 to 7 range. It had its moments, but not enough to live up to the hype. (running time 2:36)