Film reviews: The Dead Don’t Hurt | Riddle of Fire | Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey 2 | Hard Miles

In his new Western The Dead Don’t Hurt, Viggo Mortensen puts an intriguing female perspective on a traditionally masculine genre, writes Alistair Harkness

The Dead Don’t Hurt (15) ***

Riddle of Fire (12A) **

Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey 2 (18) *

Viggo Mortensen & Vicky Krieps in The Dead Don't Hurt PIC: Signature Entertainment

Hard Miles (12A) ***

The Dead Don’t Hurt is a gnarly title for a Western that prioritises character over bloodshed and mood over mayhem. Not quite old school and not quite revisionist either, Viggo Mortensen’s sophomore film as a writer/director (he also does the music and co-stars) takes a circuitous route to get to the killing we know is coming, but the non-linear plotting Mortensen deploys also enables him to put an intriguing female perspective on a traditionally masculine genre.

That perspective comes from Vicky Krieps, cast here as Vivian, the French-Canadian partner of Mortensen’s Holger Olsen, the reluctant sheriff of the frontier town they’ve settled nearby. Holger’s a stand-up guy, but he also disappears for years to fight in the Civil War, leaving the independently minded Vivian to navigate both the hardships of life on a barren range and the unpredictable whims of a town-full of corrupt and violent men, none more so than Weston (Orkney-born actor Solly McLeod), the psychotic, black-hat-wearing son of a local land baron (Garret Dillahunt).

The film opens with multiple deaths for which we know Weston is responsible and these deaths give the ensuing movie a tragic dimension as it jumps around in time to sketch out not just the context of the killings, but also the origins of Vivian and Holger’s relationship, as well as Vivian’s complicated childhood as a rebellious, Joan of Arc-obsessed girl. Vivian – played with wry humour and tough resolve by Krieps – has never relied on a man to look after her and isn’t about to start now that she’s found one she loves, something Mortensen uses to interrogate his own character’s skewed priorities.

Riddle of Fire PIC: Icon Film

Though the film’s time-fracturing approach is confusing at first, robbing the story of some momentum and power (the stately pace doesn’t always help matters either), it teases out a truer sense of the complexities involved in trying to make a go of life on the frontier than we’re used to seeing in Westerns. In part that’s because Mortensen isn’t interested in valorising his character as the hero. He may set the film in a time and a town where true justice is only achievable through violence, but even when the film reaches its inevitable, retribution-fuelled finale, Mortensen can’t quite give in to the to the gunslinger clichés he frequently flirts with. Danny Huston co-stars.

A group of feral children embark on an elaborate quest to source the ingredients for a blueberry pie in Riddle of Fire, a precocious, amateurish, self-consciously retro American indie film that mixes bits of Arthurian legend with the twee vibe of hipster coming-of-age films like Beasts of the Southern Wild and Wendy. Set in a fictional town in rural Wyoming, it kicks off with pint-sized siblings Hazel (Charlie Stover) and Jodie (Skyler Peters) and their best friend Alice (Phoebe Ferro) boosting a video game console from a nearby warehouse only to discover the boys’ mum (Danielle Hoetmer) has password-protected their TV so they can’t play it. Flattened by a cold, she agrees to unlock it for a couple of hours if they get her a blueberry pie – a task that leads them deep into the woods and quixotic adventure involving gun-toting rednecks and a coven of witches.

If this sounds unbearable, it gets worse. Writer/director/editor/co-star Weston Razooli stretches out the action for close to two hours with ever more elaborate and nonsensical plot developments, cutesy folkloric narration and faux-medieval title treatments. It’s not their fault, but the kids aren’t very good either, and nor are the adults, their line readings stiff and awkward. The end result (which was fêted at Cannes last year) is like being forced to watch a very long home movie starring someone else’s precocious children.

Still, it’s better than watching Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey 2, an even more amateurish endeavour that takes AA Milne’s now public domain creation and turns it into a witless slasher sequel to last year’s cynical horror cash-grab. The first Blood and Honey film re-imagined the inhabitants of Hundred-Acre Wood as a bunch of homicidal maniacs who kidnap and torture the adult Christopher Robin as payback for abandoning them when he grew up and went off to university. The new film rewrites its own cack-handed mythology to incorporate an Island of Doctor Moreau-style backstory that links another tragedy from Christopher Robin’s past to a mad scientist’s efforts to create hybrid beings from animals and kidnapped children.

Returning director Rhys Frake-Waterfield makes some half-hearted efforts at meta-commentary by turning the events of the first film into a movie-within-the-movie, but in lieu of anything approaching tension, scares, satire or decent jokes, he mostly just focuses on indulging old-fashioned misogynistic horror tropes. Needless to say, the acting is also appalling, with the presence of noted thesp Simon Callow – here playing a Scottish janitor with a murky past – lending the project no credibility whatsoever.

Inspired by a true story, Hard Miles finds Mathew Modine on endearingly charismatic form as Greg Townsend, a teacher at a young offenders institute in Colorado who uses his passion for cycling to set his students on the right path in life by taking them on a 700km bike ride to the Grand Canyon. Though you know exactly what you’re going to get from co-writer/director RJ Daniel Hanna’s film – traumatic backstories, inspirational speeches, cycling advice masquerading as life lessons – it’s made with care, there are some nice performances from the supporting cast, and the Colorado vistas are suitably epic.

The Dead Don’t Hurt, Riddle of Fire and Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey 2 are in cinemas from 7 June; Hard Miles is in cinemas now.