One Paragraph Movie Review: Dances With Wolves

Ninetieth film: Dances With Wolves. After playing a corpse in The Big Chill, Kevin Costner was typecast as a lifeless human shell in most movies he appeared in ever since. The scenery and costuming is utterly gorgeous, but that’s about it, and it’s about it for over three hours. Costner infiltrates a Sioux tribe and then becomes attached, just like an old West version of Point Break. We’re supposed to believe that all white men except Kev are evil, and as his mullet grows, so does an impending sense of ickiness at this white-man-as-saviour-of-savages story. Even Kevin’s love interest is white, because of course you can’t have a white saviour diddling someone outside his genetic profile, regardless of how much kidskin he’s sporting. By the time the secondary message in the second hour arrived — that guns are super-great and you can learn to shoot one instantaneously, I was pretty much done. Two unconvincing prosthetic beards out of five.