Tag: costner factor

Dub’s Take: Horizon Chapter 1 (2024)

A spoiler-free mini movie review.

3.5 out of 5

In a 2022 interview, actress Emily Blunt said she’s tired of being offered roles for “strong female leads”: “I’m already out. I’m bored. … you spend the whole time acting tough and saying tough things.”

Blunt is not a candidate for a place in Kevin Costner’s Wild West, where the women hold themselves together in the face of relentless adversity. Of the major players in this, the first part of a planned four-part series, Sienna Miller, Jena Malone, and Abbey Lee leave the greatest acting impressions, even if the film’s three-hour runtime still manages to omit information about their backstories.

The greatest strength, then, of “Horizon Chapter/Part 1” was that I was OK with my questions going unanswered until the next film, or not at all. There’s a “flying by the seat of your pants” quality to the narrative, whereby Costner plunks us in the middle of a juicy patch of land in contentious Aboriginal territory, and lets the plot play itself out. In a way, it’s the perfect continuation of “Dances With Wolves”: there, Kevin rode off mid-mission only for a titlecard to inform viewers that the Indigenous genocide continued unabated. Here, the antagonistic Apaches are represented as a dwindling, dissented tribe, holed-up in the mountains, waiting for fate’s intervention.

In my review for Costner’s 2003 feature “Open Range”, I said it lacked the “Costner Factor”, likely due to a critically-induced restraint. By the Costner Factor, I’m referring to the audacity he shows by having his self-acted characters save women and dogs from drowning, fish dead bucks out of water, and drink their own piss. Say what you want about Kevin’s acting, but he’s fearless as a producer.

Here, Costner’s discipline could be laid at his 69 years, but he still frames shots in the curvature of a prostitute’s bust, gets laid even when his character doesn’t want it, and orchestrates at least two of the tensest scenes of encroaching violence outside of a horror film.

“Yellowstone” was good for about three seasons, coincidentally the number Costner was originally contracted for, but I stopped watching the latest when it was clear the show was spinning its wheels in the writers room. Horizon may be taking its sweet time in this first chapter, but I trust Costner more than Taylor Sheridan to carry me over the finish line.

Poster sourced from impawards.com. What do you think? Did you, too, think the “wagon trail” story – despite the promising ensemble of Luke Wilson, Will Patton, and Isabelle Fuhrman – is perfunctory in the face of the ultimate wagon trail simulator that is Taylor Sheridan’s “1883” (even if it was basically garbage)? How many takes of the “boob shot” did Kevin have to do before he got it “just right”? Was it necessary for Costner to use his kid in a short role, only for all the news reports about it to highlight that Kevin “went hard” directing him? Leave your comments below!

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Dub’s Take: Open Range (2003)

A spoiler-free mini movie review.

1.5 out of 5

Everything about Kevin Costner’s “Open Range” is calculated antithesis to his much-maligned 1997 feature “The Postman”, and that is where its failure lies: Costner seems more concerned here with atonement than doing anything new & exciting with the Western genre.

Coming off Postman & “Waterworld” probably humbled Kevin enough to dial the front-and-centre “Costner Factor” back for this, his third official directorial effort. Along with top billing, Costner has given up the density of background extras, dolly shots, and side-stories that distinguishes both Postman and his first feature “Dances With Wolves”. It’s clear this is a deliberate sanitization on Costner’s part: Open Range’s first-act visual metaphor of him digging a stuck wagon out of mud is apt.

But taken as its own entertainment as opposed to a feature-length critical response, Open Range lacks the Costner Factor’s chutzpah. It’s a “two people in a room” movie, but on a field. Nothing in screenwriters Lauran Paine’s & Craig Storper’s monologues come to any revelatory philosophical conclusions: it’s all dialogue you’ve probably heard already on Costner’s current revivification “Yellowstone”. Robert Duvall’s & Costner’s acting is fine, but Annette Bening seems to have taken her direction of “speaking with the eyes” (like DWW’s Mary McDonnell and Postman’s Olivia Williams) too literally, looking like a deer-in-the-headlights the whole time.

There was some nice texture. I liked the design of the town and its quick-and-dirty construction. I liked how the two men were pretty much able to take over the whole thing with just their combined gunslinger experience. Having animals in distress (especially the Good Bois here) is a dirty filmmaking trick, but Costner the director goes-for-broke, which I appreciate, because if you’re going to go there, go all the way. And the climactic showdown – for all its over-editing – is gleefully violent, with touches of Leone, Peckinpah, and even John Woo. But these details stand out independently of the overlong film, rather than elements of its whole. DWW justified its length with solemnity, and Postman with narrative scope. Open Range has neither.

Kevin should be commended for his attempts at diffidence here but, for those of us who care, time will tell whether his upcoming four-part theatrical serial “Horizon” is a return-to-form of the Costner Factor.

Poster sourced from impawards.com. What do you think? Are you a fan of The Postman like I am? Were you equally-horrified when you showed it to your friends and they all laughed and said it was crap? Share your Postman Viewing Party stories in the comments below!

Posted on by wd 0