Tuesday, March 13, 2007

Renegade


This is another movie I picked up cheaply on DVD not long ago. Not as cheaply as THE WHITE GORILLA. And as it turns out, not cheaply enough.

RENEGADE is based on the series of French graphic novels written by Jean-Michel Charlier and drawn by Jean "Moebius" Girard featuring Mike Blueberry, who gets involved in all sorts of classic Western situations. In various stories Blueberry has been a lawman, a cavalry officer, a bounty hunter, a government agent, and I don't know what else. I've read several of the graphic novels and enjoyed them quite a bit. But the makers of RENEGADE have taken out everything that made the character and the stories fun.

As a result, we're left with a movie that's murky, pretentious, slow, hard to follow, and almost devoid of plot. The story, such as it is, involves an attempt to stir up trouble between the Indians and the white settlers so that the villains can steal the Indians' gold . . . or some psychedelic drugs . . . or something. None of it makes much sense. Vincent Cassell is totally miscast as Blueberry. The only somewhat redeeming moments feature Ernest Borgnine as a crippled lawman and Michael Madsen chewing the scenery as a bad guy.

This may well be the worst movie I've ever watched all the way through. Even THE WHITE GORILLA is better. Tons better. Trust me on this.

2 comments:

Randy Johnson said...

I don't know. You must not have watched Plan 9 From Outer Space all the way through.

James Reasoner said...

That's true. I'm sure there actually are worse movies than RENEGADE. I can think of quite a few that I turned off after watching fifteen or twenty minutes. But since I'd paid money for this one, and since I like the stories it's based on, I forced myself to watch all of it in hopes that it would get better. It didn't.