Half-burying his parlously wounded pal, HardyвЂ™s character takes off after the bounty bonanza promised by his leader for overtime vigil.ДiCaprioвЂ™s Glass barely lives through a grizzlyвЂ™s mauling - so graphic and prolonged it tears strips from your sangfroid - before he is cascading down wintry falls, chewing live fish, disembowelling a horseвЂ‰.вЂ‰.вЂ‰.

Leonardo DiCaprio plays a semi-fictionalised version of Hugh Glass, a Midwest trapper who survived against near-impossible odds in the 1820s, living to stalk - in the filmвЂ™s telling - the fellow trapper (Tom Hardy) who leaves him for dead, knowing him still alive. The next bear, the next storm, the next pack of howling natives.

They hate to stop because the grass is always bloodierвЂ‰.вЂ‰.вЂ‰. Spiced with tragic irony, that kernel is surely the filmвЂ™s essence as narrative nutrition?Д®ndurance yarns are the opposite. Ambrose Bierce would have taken 10 pages to polish off the revenge kernel of The Revenant. Switchback ironies runic mischiefs and recoil ingenuities incidents at Owl Creek. Morality tales are short because they are little twists of wisdom in which the storyвЂ™s end bites the storyвЂ™s beginning. What the devil happens when, as in The Revenant, you mix the two? Morality tales know exactly when to stop: thatвЂ™s their point. Survival stories donвЂ™t know when to stop: thatвЂ™s their point.

The revenant free