OK, OK… Fine. I’ll watch The Power of the Dog. It seems everyone and his father’s brother’s nephew’s cousin’s former roommate is watching and rating it highly, so there must be something there. I know it’s a Jane Campion Western… and that combo doesn’t interest me. Not a big fan of Westerns and add in some arthouse pacing, and it sounds like it’ll be the power of the slog, if you know what I mean. But I gave it a shot.

Benedict Cumberbatch and Jessie Plemons play brother ranchers… Cumberbatch is rough and tumble, Plemons more refined. Plemons winds up marrying a widow (Kirsten Dunst) with a, shall we say, sensitive teenage son (Kodi Smith McPhee). This enrages good old Benny C and he sets out to psychologically torment the wife, often using the teen as his pawn.

Honestly, I found this, indeed, a bit of a slog. It’s a slow burn film that delivers on the power of the tense score without ever really delivering the payoff… or so it seems. I was impatient with it and I honestly dozed off for a good forty minutes and had to rewind and catch up with my own eyelids the next day. So nobody will accuse me of being engaged.

I will say the movie has the power of the acting and the power of the cinematography though. Nobody is going to take away the fact the movie looks great and that Benedict Cumberbatch plays a convincing surly asshole. I guess you could say Benedict <pause> has been a dick. Thank you, thank you. I’m here all week. Tip your waitresses.

But I was constantly waiting for the TNT to go off, the powder keg to ignite, the raging bull to rage. But this is what happens when the Raging Bull is just really cranky but never winds up punching anyone. The power of the slow burn, indeed. His numerous scenes with the teenage boy bubble with unreleased tension and that’s pretty effective filmmaking. In the hands of most other storytellers, we’d get a typical Hollywood payoff.

And then the whiff of an ending and I was about to throw my imaginary popcorn at the screen. Until the power of the clever reveal comes in and I had to reanalyze everything I thought I had been watching. And, yeah, what was turning out to be a pretty mediocre watch suddenly turned into something that made me say, “Huh. That’s kind of neat”.

I’m not really sure I appreciated getting to that point, but the movie couldn’t have delivered without that slow burn. So I’m giving it a good review, almost despite myself.

Score: 82