(This review may contain spoilers).
I have to be honest and say that I came very close to walking out of this movie. While I was expecting it to be hard to watch, I’d thought that would be because of the bitter history between the two peoples…not because there were so many mistakes made, I was left questioning how anyone survived at all.
While the movie did do a passable job of showing the distance between the two groups, I felt it focused far more on the relationship between Joseph and Rosalie, rather than any kind of attempts to bridge the gap between the groups.
I also found it very hard to care about the characters or form an emotional attachment to them. While it did seem like some attempts were made to provide some depth to Joseph, at least, I found it hard to see him as a good man. In fact, it was hard to see much good in any of them – and while Chief Yellow Hawk was supposed to have once been dangerous, there were no hints of that and I thought his son demonstrated more of that.
While there were parts of this movie that were difficult to watch, that was really more to do with the action than any real emotion attached to any of the characters. And at times, some of the supporting characters seemed more like mouthpieces to talk about the hostilities.
I did also guess pretty early on who was going to die. And when the action did actually occur, it moved too quickly for anything to be really absorbed. Because so little of the characters’ personalities were shown, the people who died just became nameless corpses.
The movie would have been a lot better if the characters had actually interacted with each other and more had been made of Yellow Hawk’s comments about being stronger together, at least in my opinion. A much smaller group of characters would have been easier to focus on and care about – and more than just talking about past hostilities would have made emotional connections much easier.
The ending was one I saw coming several miles off and was really a disappointing finish to a movie that really didn’t live up to its promise. To be honest, I won’t be watching this movie again.
Ink of Blood 