Blueberry

• Blueberry: L’expérience secrete (France) / Renegade (US)
• Directed by Jan Kounen
• February 11, 2004
• Adapted from the Franco-Belgian comic book series Blueberry illustrated by Jean Giraud (a.k.a.  Moebius) and scripted by Jean-Michel Charlier

After a run-in with an outlaw in a brothel, Mike Blueberry becomes a marshal in Arizona where he keeps the peace between local whites and Apaches.

I went into Blueberry quite blind. I have heard of the comic but am overall unfamiliar with the source material. It’s my understanding that this movie differs greatly from what it is supposedly based on to the point that you can find it as Blueberry and Renegade (its American release name) on Amazon. 

As a film it is described in places as an acid Western which I guess means its only real purpose is to be as weird as possible without telling much story or even a coherent story. And it begins accomplishing that shortly after it starts. Blueberry is so weird and tells so little story I’m not even sure if that’s Blueberry (Hugh O’Conor as a young Mike Blueberry/Vincent Cassel as the adult Mike Blueberry) in the opening scene.

The longer this movie goes on, the more questions you develop because what is going on becomes ever murkier. Stuff just kind of happens but you have no idea why it is happening or why characters are so motivated to take action. It takes forever before you find out they are looking for what they believe is a goldmine.

This movie spends so much time on its strange imagery and just attempting to be weird that not much occurs in over two hours. It just kind of slowly moves along never picking up much speed or giving the audience an understanding of what exactly is going on enough for them to care about the plot by Sullivan (Geoffrey Lewis) or expanding upon the relationship between Blueberry and Sullivan’s daughter (Juliette Lewis).

I have no idea what the point of the story was. Why did other villain Wallace Sebastian Blount (Michael Madsen) want to get to the cave everybody thought was some sort of source of gold? To die? To have a shamanic experience? To rub Blueberry’s face in what he knew about that night in the brothel? I’m not sure of his motivation. Or was Blueberry about Blueberry ultimately finding love with Sullivan’s daughter? Did anybody making this movie know?

I will say that Blueberry has some of the better-looking production values of many of the Westerns I’ve seen lately. There was certainly some money behind this, but money and weirdness only go so far. You need to tell a good story and this just did not. Maybe with another look at the script or with some judicious editing to cut out 30 or so minutes of weird footage this might’ve been tighter and thus better. Visually it’s competently directed. You could even say artistic, but as a narrative it just falls flat.

Blueberry or Renegade or whatever you want to call it certainly had the potential to be good but because the people behind this wanted to be weird rather than tell a story it fell flat. I think you can skip this unless you’re looking for something artsy but don’t expect to know what’s going on.