Renegade (2004)

Highly Overrated But Still Good

The movie's neither hopeful in contrived ways, nor hopeless in different contrived ways. Somehow it manages to be wonderful

The acting is good, and the firecracker script has some excellent ideas.

The tone of this movie is interesting -- the stakes are both dramatic and high, but it's balanced with a lot of fun, tongue and cheek dialogue.

One of the trippiest and strangest westerns since 'El Topo', but besides visual exploration, don't expect too much coherence in story telling. The film goes deeper and deeper into the spiritual territories, but at the end leaves the viewer dissatisfied as by the end all the visual treats are just an hollow experiments and nothing more. The computer generated meditation and hallucination scenes are there just to be there for visual purpose. Although empty and somewhat confusing, they don't feel like some foreign bodies thrown in as these scenes beautifully melt in with the overall flow of the movie. The cinematography sometimes feel restless with its constant camera pans and rotations. We are never allowed to rest our eyes on steady shot. But the restless camera is supported with good editing so it doesn't start to distract too much.Unconventional western with unconventional hero and villain with unconventional motives. Not as deep and spiritual as it aspires to be, but nonetheless entertaining to watch mostly thanks to its great cast and lively cinematography. The film that is definitely meant for the big screen to get the full enjoyment out if it.

Jan Kounen's Renegade, or Blueberry as its called in some regions, is the strangest western I've ever seen. To call it strange is an understatement in fact. First off, it's not a perfect movie, and I'm not raving about it. But despite its flaws with pacing, it's a damn interesting one with some really beautiful, sweeping cinematography, a great cast and some really unique sequences that are just unlike anything you've seen in the genre before. Vincent Cassel plays Mike Blueberry, a man who after a tragedy in his youth, flees to the nearby mountains and is raised by the natives there. When he emerges in adulthood he becomes Marshal of a small town set on the plains there. He's forced to deal with marauding outsiders led by Wallace Sebastian Blount (Michael Madsen) who also figures into his tragic past. Madsen gives the work of his career as an enigmatic, terrifying outlaw who's on the hunt for an unconventional treasure hidden in the mountains. He blows into town like the winds of hell and stirs up trouble with Blueberry, the mayor (Ernest Borgnine), and all kinds of folk. Blueberry and his old flame Maria (Juliette Lewis) are led on a haunting quest to the mountains to stop Blount and locate the treasure. The film's distinct quality is one 15 minute sequence near the end that jumps the shark and leaves you floored, as it's essentially a peyote trip happening on screen, with scintillating cg artwork, slithering ethereal snakes and all sorts of metaphysical chaos happening as Cassel and Madsen do battle in the Astral plane, and Cassel comes face to face with his baked soul, and the surprising revelation that has haunted him for years. It's worth seeing just for that alone, as it's like nothing I've ever seen. Seriously. Djimon Hounsou has a grisly appearance you won't forget, Eddie Izzard shows up as a snivelling weasel, and there's nice work from Temuera Morrison, Geoffrey Lewis, Tchecky Karyo and Colm Meaney as well. It's also aesthetically pleasing to look at, some of the shots are pure gold and I wish it played in theaters so I could have a chance to see it on the big screen. Like I said though, it's far from perfect. There's some tonal issues. The writing is sometimes clunky. But it's worth it just for the earthy, ethereal spectacle of it alone, and like it or not, you'll be glad you checked it out.

There was always a taste for the mystic in comic books, 'Blueberry' is a western derived from a comic book and that is a great starting point. It also tries to reach you on a spiritual level specially by showing hallucinations, reminding us of Stanley Kubrick's '2001'. But Jan Koonen should have followed Kubrick's style in what this film lacks the most: clearness, precision, well explained scenes. Instead you see vague and confusing scenes which makes you have to see the film again to understand it. Nowadays, this is not such a problem, but is it worth it? Vincent Cassel is an ideal Blueberry, Juliette Lewis is pretty, interesting and charming as Maria and Michael Madsen is a hateful Wall Blount. If Sergio Leone innovated by creating a showdown of three people in 'The Good, the Bad and the Ugly' ,Koonen tries to shows us a spiritual, psychedelic showdown. It just does not reach us enough to make it worth seeing.

I'm a huge fan of Blueberry:the comic. There are actually many American heroes in french comics that Americans have probably never heard of. There's of course "Blueberry", "Buck Danny", "Comanche", "XIII", etc. Some are quite naive, and others are very, very good. The story that inspired the movie: "The lost German's mine" and its sequel "The specter with the gold bullets" is actually one of the best graphic/scenario combination I've ever read and is still one of my favorites.Unfortunately they never thought of giving the director's job to someone who understands the epoch and the place's context. In making this movie, two big mistakes were made.The first one was to give Apache mysticism a way, way too prominent role (it is only addressed as a superstition linked to an Apache sacred and forbidden territory in the original) and magnify it to proportions that have no relation with reality. This utterly robs the story of its adventurous flavor and transforms it into a story of revenge.The second one was to give the role of Mike Blueberry to Vincent Cassel. Don't get me wrong, Vincent Cassel is a great actor. You only have to watch his impersonation of Mesrine, France's public enemy to see it. In that role he is just fantastic. But Blueberry is another thing altogether. In that role he is totally unconvincing and despite his best efforts, he just can't manage the American slang. It's just not natural. It's clearly fabricated. He also moves and walks like a Frenchman, not like an American. And as the whole cast orbits around this acting failure, it then fails to deliver itself. As this works as a cascade, if neither the hero, nor the cast is convincing, then even the background becomes out of key. It is also worth mentioning that using Louisiana or Canada to justify the use of french in an American movie has become so stale and stereotyped that it is now totally counterproductive. Instead of catching your attention on a clever twist, it now shows a serious creative limitation.The screenplay brought the original story crashing down in such a way that it became almost painful to watch. Even Steven Spielberg (who is obviously not a Frenchman and who took an enormous risk with Tintin's fans) managed to cut and paste several TinTin's adventures and make a homogeneous screenplay.There was nothing wrong with the comic's story and it should not have been tampered with. With such an adaptation disaster, I seriously doubt that a sequel might be attempted, and it's too bad, because the other very good Blueberry adventure is such a good material for a movie with a lot of sequels that one can only shake one's head at the lost opportunity. That saga comes in ten consecutive comics whose titles are: "Chihuahua Pearl", "The man that was worth $500,000", "Ballad for a coffin", "The outlaw", "Angel Face", "Broken-nose", "The long walk", "The ghost tribe", "The last card", "The end of the trail".The story is about the fate of the confederate gold after the civil war and what happens to Blueberry after being framed for its theft.So...I don't recommend Blueberry, the movie. Read the comics instead, you won't be disappointed. If you don't know where to find them, contact me, I'm on Facebook.