RENEGADE aka BLUEBERRY (2004)
Reviewed by Jerry Saravia
Vincent Cassel is Blueberry, a Man With No Attitude, who is marshal of a small town. Before becoming marshal, he was a young kid who witnessed the death of a prostitute who deflowered him. Eventually, his own uncle is killed, and he finds himself being nurtured by Chiracahua natives who call him Broken Nose. Years later, Blueberry is in a town where there are the requisite bevy of prostitutes, amoral gunslingers, and not much else. Juliette Lewis is the spunky, Annie Oakley-type who sings "Danny Boy." Geoffrey Lewis (Juliette's real-life father) also plays her father in this film. There is also Colm Meaney as Blueberry's friend, Michael Madsen as the amoral villain who's searching for Indian gold, Eddie Izzard as a Prussian mercenary who may be trying for Marlon Brando's "Missouri Breaks"-type of colorful acting, and the welcome addition of Ernest Borgnine.
The movie is a mess, a beautiful mess to be sure. Vincent Cassel is a less than charismatic, blank presence - registering nothing at all that seems vaguely human (what a disappointment when you consider his hellishly alive performance in "Hate"). The cinematography is gorgeous to be sure with its widescreen vistas, but then so were John Ford's and Sergio Leone's westerns and they had more to say than this film. The peyote, drug-fueled imagery towards the end goes on way past the level of patience. Since we know next to nothing about the boring protagonist, why should we care about his peyote trances?
Based on Jean 'Moebius' Giraud's comic books, "Blueberry" is a pretty disaster that follows on the heels of superior films such as "El Topo" and "Dead Man." To paraphrase Orson Welles's own paraphrasing of Kipling, "It is pretty, but is it art?"
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