Bullet Points: Mohawk
I have had a deep desire to see more Native movies since I was just a little guy running around my backyard with a toy tomahawk. I’m also a massive fan of action movies so I’m not really interested in watching movies not involving hundreds of braves hacking away at others. What that leaves me with is only a handful of action movies featuring Native Americans where they’re slinging arrows at each other instead of insults.
Synopsis: Late in the War of 1812, a young Mohawk woman and her two lovers battle a squad of American soldiers hell-bent on revenge.
- L.O.D. 1800: Kaniehtiio Horn plays the lead character, Okwaho, and I won’t lie when I say that I totally thought she was wearing a bad wig. Maybe I was wrong. Horn is of actual Mohawk blood and if I had one major issue with her performance here it was that she didn’t get enough time to fully develop the character. The story is a very simple one. It shouldn’t have needed as much time to get going but it felt like it was halfway over with before we finally get to sink our teeth into anything.
- A sneaky bunch of guys: Was it just me or did someone get snuck up on every few minutes for the entire first act of the movie?
- Naked and Afraid: The group of American soldiers are assholes, no doubt. Hell, early American history, and American history present and probably American future will be filled with assholes. These ones, though, are really determined to kill as many of the Mohawk as possible. What they don’t mention in the movie is that the Mohawk, along with many of the Native tribes in the area allied themselves with the British. They also don’t mention how the British royally screwed them over by abandoning them. The American guys here grow even more determined to kill the Natives when the son of the ruthless Colonel Holt (Ezra Buzzington) is killed by one of them. It’s shortly after that Holt decides to bare all and wash himself in a stream. Why he would find the need to strip off his clothes to clean blood from his skin that was covered by the clothes is beyond me. It was a true Van Damme moment.
- Immaculate perception: The soldiers start chasing Okwaho and her two buddies and finally corner them in a little underground tunnel. One of the dudes crawls in after them and is dragged out but doesn’t have a speck of dirt on him. What the heck?
- Threeway Love: I would say that it’s somewhat obvious that Okwaho, Joshua (Eamon Farren), and Calvin Two Rivers (Justin Rain) are all in a relationship. We see the first two bumping uglies early on in the movie but Calvin keeps hanging around like third wheel until a couple of scenes point to Joshua and his potential relationship. I think that it could have been done better. I don’t feel like Joshua and Okwaho were that worried about Two Rivers when he got captured. If you’re going to go full threeway love them go all out.
- Luke-warm-blooded killers: That is possibly the most clever bullet point that I’ve ever written. WWE Superstar Luke Harper plays one of the American soldiers and they’re not so much cold-blooded killers, but more luke-warm. Get it? Harper makes for a massively uncharacteristic soldier of 1814 but he does a pretty decent job of emoting with his coal-black eyes.
- Vision Monster:The movie follows the soldiers as they chase after Okwaho and crew. They make themselves out to be idiots at almost every turn. Why are they so determined to chased down a few random people? Who knows? Holt’s son is killed early on but he barely mentions him throughout the film and just keeps trying to make us believe that he is some sort of metaphor for white America. Eventually Okwaho turns into some skeleton-faced vision monster and starts going to town on the whole bunch of them.
- Bad knee and Tippecanoe too: Luke Harper must have been dealing with an injury at the time.
- Not my America: I didn’t care for the attempt to make Colonel Holt out to be some sort of embodiment of the American psyche of the time. If anything, he would be more in line with the Manifest Destiny or Military Industrial Complex crowd. The young Yancy (Noah Segan) would be the generation of new Americans, and Luke Harper would be the poor, lower class citizens that suffer the most during times of war.
The Verdict: Mohawk had all sorts of interesting concepts. It was a bit of Apocalypto. A little Predator, and something that I like to call the “anti-Mel Gibson movie”. The British were the good guys here. Or at least the ones that weren’t present enough to be bad. The Americans do nothing here except kill people and generally suck at everything. I wish that Okwaho had a larger role. She should have only put the paint on her face after she turned into the killing machine and I could have used way more badass Okwana instead of running for her life Okwana. The movie never failed to entertain me. I love anything dealing with Native Americans as I was totally obsessed with Tecumseh as a kid. If you haven’t seen it then you need to get there. Until then, though, check out Mohawk and be sure to let me know what you think.
