Review: War Pony

War Pony
Cert: 15 / 115 mins / Dir. Gina Gammell & Riley Keough / Trailer

A sign of our post-modern times I'm sure, War Pony is about neither war, nor ponies. And that's okay, not everything needs to be literal. But I'm guessing directors Gina Gammell and Riley Keough were paying by the letter, so it was cheaper than calling the film "Two Hours Of Red-Dirt Squalor, Unlikeable Characters, Unintelligible Dialogue, Face-Tattoos, Bad Hip-Hop and Dead Animals". They also appeared to have comfortably met the budget by not wasting time on things like rehearsals, or a young cast who've ever seen the end of an acting lesson. Although all of this in a project which had its genesis in American Honey comes as approximately no surprise.

The film is a thanklessly grim montage of moral agnosticism where mood and tone override narrative convention, baiting the viewer into bracing themselves for the worst and then pulling back to reveal merely more muted misery instead. Credit where it's due, the dual-thread events of 'Hallow'een night' in the third act are tense, but that could be because by this point the audience has been waiting an hour and a half for something to happen.

It's awful.

Obviously, I don't expect anyone to actually agree with this ill-tempered summation. Under normal circumstances I'd call War Pony unwatchable, but the fact that I somehow sat through it until the closing credits seems to indicate I'd be wrong about that, too...

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