Blueberry (2004)

Renegade is the rare western that isn’t content to ride the horizon—it wants to ride straight into your subconscious, using the genre’s familiar dust-and-gunmetal mood as a launchpad for something stranger and more dreamlike. Jan Kounen stages the frontier as a place where myth and memory bleed into each other, and Vincent Cassel’s haunted marshal gives the film a bruised human center even when the imagery turns boldly psychedelic. If you’re on the fence, know this: it’s less a tidy shoot-’em-up than a visually audacious fever journey, with shamanic ritual and Sacred Mountains atmosphere photographed like a waking vision. It won’t be for everyone—especially if you prefer your westerns grounded and your drug imagery minimal—but if you’re open to a genre film that takes big swings, it’s a genuinely singular ride.

Renegade is clearly trying to mash up a dusty Western with a surreal, spiritual fever dream, using Vincent Cassel’s haunted marshal as the bridge between frontier justice and shamanic ritual. The problem is it often feels torn in half: the plot lurches, the tone swings wildly, and the storytelling can be so murky that you’re watching striking images without a satisfying sense of momentum or payoff. If you want a coherent, classic Western or you care about fidelity to the Blueberry comics, this will likely frustrate you more than it intrigues you. But if you’re patient with arthouse weirdness, trippy drug-vision sequences, and mood over logic, there are flashes of atmosphere and ambition that might make it worth a look.