Wes Studi

  • Battledogs (2013)

    Battledogs (2013)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, April 2021) I’m at a point where even seeing “The Asylum presents” in the opening credits of a film can be enough to make me think about shutting it off and watching something else. But the remote was too far away and I was doing something else and what was the worst that could happen, right? Well, as it turns out, Battledogs is still not a good movie… but it’s not as bad as what I was expecting. This tale of werewolves/zombies/monsters/whatever running rampant over Manhattan is executed with more skill than I expected from yet another made-for-Syfy production. There are a few known names in the production (Dennis Haysbert, Ernie Hudson, Ariana Richards and Wes Studi), but the film’s most distinguishing characteristic is the energy in which it executes its rote plotting of monster attacks and military super-soldier nonsense. Its quantity-over-quality approach to special effects is defensible (how else are you going to get an exploding helicopter on a budget?), and the actors don’t do too badly. There’s even something that looks suspiciously like non-CGI effects here. But please understand that I’m grading on a curve here, and even saying something like “this isn’t the worst Asylum/Syfy film I’ve even seen” is far from being an absolute compliment. Still, we all rate films according to expectations, and mine were exceeded in watching Battledogs.

  • Hostiles (2017)

    Hostiles (2017)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On TV, April 2020) On paper, Hostiles has some exceptional elements to play with—written and directed by Scott Cooper, starring Christian Bale, Rosamund Pike and Wes Studi, with a story that follows an army officer escorting a Cheyenne chief across dangerous territory in the 1890s. In intent, it’s determined to be a revisionist western, with an adequately nuanced look at the Native American characters. Bale, Pike and Studi are as good as ever, while Cooper gets some great landscapes to showcase along the journey. Plus, there are pre-stardom roles for Timothée Chalamet, Jesse Plemons and Jonathan Majors. But while the result is a respectable dramatic western, it’s not a great film, nor is it as great as it thinks it is—and this is hardly the first Cooper film to suffer from that kind of hubris. The elements are there, but something is missing from the result. Maybe fun, maybe humility.