Johnny Depp
Il Coraggioso

There are people - it's true - who cannot watch black and white films. Old masterpieces of horror cinematography where the music reaches excessively sharp and shrill tones, covering the voice and the action. Just like that. All of a sudden. Films like "Night of the Living Dead," for example, which are labeled as "a boring black and white" because of the damned audio.
Well, because of these people, I ended up watching this film last night. A "because of," on my part, that does not contain any personal references to the cultural gender embodied and generalized in these people and does not constitute an act of accusation. My "because of" is just the grimace of those random and fatal events that condition the grand mechanism of life, shifting hypothetical levers that deviate hypothetical tracks. The train of existence is a train that cannot be stopped - cannot be stopped - because there is no one at the helm - and it travels the track infinitely. The web of tracks - which are often the same, other times lead to cliffs, to uphill paths, to downhill paths, or into the middle of nowhere - as I was saying, the web of tracks never ends. And yet it is important - damn important, really - to understand how this journey and these paths, how the same trains and the same passengers and the same landscape they admire from the windows are the fruit of the most shameless and frantic chance. Everything happens, in short, by chance. Not just that. Everything is the reflection of chance. Pure chance. Its natural offspring and incarnation. The image of chance is the world we inhabit. Our life. Our actions, over which we fundamentally have no control. Other roads lead to other worlds. Other things. Towards "different" things. Always without a sense. Because everything happens by chance. Even when we find ourselves standing in a bar gulping down drinks and chatting with random people, cultivating random friendships in meetings that happened by chance. The trouble, however, is that I was the one who brought the "The Brave" DVD. Because it was loaned to me and I hadn't watched it yet. So perhaps it's not even completely someone else's fault for what I experienced yesterday, the experience I am about to narrate. Perhaps I was nothing more than a pawn. A yellow plastic piece caught in the icy will of an experimenting and sadistic consciousness. An evanescent creature made of mist and gray, tall to the inscrutable. And I, as its random emissary. An unaware executor hired for the sole purpose of being catapulted into a pre-written situation, over which I could not impose any control or modification or event. A temporary life path, with no objectives and without an end. Already decided. And without any purpose apart from being there.

Ten seconds of echo on this last sentence. Flickering lights. Color.

Flashforward - we are in a hospital room. A man shakes another man who was holding his head in his hands. The second man is crying. The first man is completely distraught.

Johnny, what the hell's gotten into you, for Christ's sake? Why, I ask - why! - waste your time, your money - your money Johnny! your damn money - on creating a film like this? You need to speak Johnny, damn it - you need to speak!! - [the man shakes the second man furiously, grabbing him by the shoulders and staring at him with crazed eyes] - there's something I have to tell you Johnny. Do you want to know, huh? Johnny! Do you want to know, Christ of a god? [Johnny recovers for a moment from his confused emotion. In the grip of the utmost disorientation and for a split second, he meets the man's gaze. His expression turns into that of an individual who has just seen his own double in another's body, aware that the person in front of him cannot be him] - Well then, Johnny, damn it, I will tell you, and I will be clear and painless, and I want you to open those filthy ears of yours, you understand?? Can you hear me, damned one? Are you listening, Johnny?? Jo-ooooo-hnny!!! [but it's too late. Johnny is now falling and sinking into himself. From his point of view, we see a circle, his field of view, a black silhouette closing ever tighter on the person in front of him, dozens and dozens of yards below him, becoming smaller and smaller. Smaller and smaller. Everything around him is black. A blackness that closes in and thickens on what is other black. And a voice, the man's voice, that weakens visibly but despite the collapse continues to reach... ever weaker... to his ears] - Johnny!! What I had to tell you is this: I want you to know that I thought this film was crap!! Did you hear that Johnny?? It was crap!! Did you get that?? Crap!! And now carry this cursed scream to your grave, son of a bitch!!

Darkness. Sepulchral thud. Silence. Ten seconds of darkness and silence with reverberations to the absolute nothingness, then...

Annoying and sudden whiteness - long sequence shot of the sun. Optical reflections. General torpor.

Raphael is a Cochise Indian who lives in a trailer with his unbearable family within a sort of junkyard-amusement park. Everything is very calm, very still. Nothing happens. The children of our hero - two small kids - sleep all day. His wife is always in bed at home and does nothing except watch TV. Raphael needs to work, but not to escape this pitiful situation and stay as far away as possible from the annoyance, but to not let them lack anything. He is worried indeed. And it is clearly visible how and how much his mask is constrained in this timeless and endless worry. A paranoia that soon becomes the cause of an endless series of events devoid of the slightest damn sense. We return to the Indian camp, at the amusement park. Because soon a demolition company will rightly clear this heap of tin and cardboard and throw its inhabitants out onto the street. Then, let's take a moment to breathe, because there's time, since this episode will be thrown in our face only in the last 5 minutes of the film. 5 out of 120. At least Raphael's expression is always the same. And the story imposes itself. Our hero is in fact someone who hits the booze hard, even though we only see him get drunk once, and who has been in and out of jail multiple times for robberies, thefts, and other nonsense. We find out about this not from him, but from a guy who is essentially asking him if he has a wife and kids (and the direct follow-up of two such questions can lead to only one conclusion in a film) because he is about to offer him a job that - attention - Raphael himself went to hunt down in a sort of office-factory.
The man leads him to the basement of the building into a closed and heavy environment with a very '80s figurative aesthetic (the film is from 1997), vaguely reminiscent of certain brick environments from Hostel, with the difference that here we are facing none other than Marlon Brando, in a wheelchair and terribly made up, playing a harmonica. The old man performs in a meaningless monologue in which he explains to Raphael (the Johnny Depp of the direction) that the two are the same and that he can offer him a lot of money. A week hence, in short, the work begins. Raphael obviously accepts, given that the only thing asked of him is to get tortured like an animal and bear with courage the coming of an announced death. A death wanted anyway, and I would say at this point "interim," since it was self-procured by the protagonist himself in one of the most successful scenes of this enormous heap of absolute nothing, that is when our hero enters the office-factory with a crumpled piece of paper not just to look for a job, but "that" job.
In a sort of unintended representation of some kind of Adecco dispenser of death. It is clear that if this were the meaning of the film, I would have evaluated it from another perspective and given it a different evaluation, but I'm afraid - I'm seriously afraid - that these were not the intentions.

The fact is that from here on, our Johnny still has a week of time and a wad of generously anticipated money from the old man (a roll of 20-dollar bills), with which he can make gifts to his wife, children, and the whole village by organizing a kind of beer fest for junk collectors in that Burtonian-Fellian court of miracles that is his village, in a frenzy of styles ranging from Tim Burton's scene of the nocturnal gift to the children, to the anonymous U.S.A. road movie of bus journeys in the desert, to the romantic of him watching his wife and children asleep, to the saccharine, to the transcendental, to the ironic, up to the rape and revenge, and to the cheap Lynch, to the cheap Carpenter because-there-are-Carpenter-like-music, and again to the '80s.

The film essentially unfolds over the last week of this useless character's life. Eons of pure nothing that we admire as bewildered spectators and are forced to traverse with him in a triumphant nothingness flaunted and absolutely pretexted. The void of his journeys, of his walking among wrecks in the desert with the little son, of his continually making a fool of himself with his wife while an unbearable pseudo-orchestral music (one of the most banal and useless things ever heard in a film and incredibly composed by Iggy Pop [!!!]) contributes to delivering the final coup de grace to our poor nerves, up to the useless, abominable, and worthy of being tested against heavy-objects-toss-at-the-screen open ending, where the dearly hoped-for death of the protagonist is denied to us, when Raphael simply takes the elevator to the initial masonry dungeon, fully resigned to his self-sentencing task "to save his family," in what becomes, in a completely inexplicable and gratuitous way, his execution.

An execution supported by a story on the borderline of fragile and unlikely, studded with incredibly useless and disconnected scenes inserted solely to give the film a total formal cinematic completeness (noteworthy in this regard is the fact that the film contains practically all the typical scenes necessary for wrapping a movie in the classic American narrative mold of the '80s-'90s, regardless of the genre), but lacking any shred of motivation or content.

A film judged as one of the best films about Indians.
A film certainly sumptuous and undoubtedly costing equally a boatload of money.
A film certainly curated and "complete" (for the reasons I explained before) from a purely cinematic and technical standpoint.
But also a totally, absolutely, and irrefutably useless, superfluous, and infertile film.
A gigantic pile of nothing over 2 mental years.
An astral ship filled with shit, launched into space at the speed of sound, and made to explode fourteen centimeters before touching the soil of Jupiter, that is: a stellar crap.
A...

Stop. I need to calm down.
Someone owes me something.
Johnny. You owe me something.
Wherever you are, I'll find you eventually.
It doesn't matter when. It doesn't matter how.
Sooner or later I'll find you, damn son of a bitch, and tear you to pieces.

No one can ever return the 2 hours I spent watching this interminable heap of excrement.