Movie Review: Mohawk (2017)

Starring: Kaniehtiio Horn, Ezra Buzzington and Eamon Farren

Directed by: Ted Geoghegan

The year is 1812 and we follow the story of a young Mohawk woman who along with her two lovers are being hunted down by a small squad of American soldiers hell-bent on revenge after a recent attack.

I’m trying to get back into watching movies regularly on my commute to work but the Netflix available to download category offers little inspiration as I scrape the barrel and try and find something that I haven’t seen. I made a slight blunder by picking Mohawk as I mistakenly got it confused with the Green Inferno but I had already clicked play before I realised so decided to just keep on watching and hope for the best.

Where to begin? Mohawk is one of the worst movies that I’ve seen all year and had very few redeeming qualities as I hated pretty much everything that this film had to offer. The acting was truly woeful, especially from Ezra Buzzington who played American Colonel Hezikiah Holt. I think he was meant to have been a hard ass who was fuelled by hate and was both dangerous and deadly but Ezra Buzzington failed to capture any of those qualities and really failed to give this story the solid ‘bad guy’ character which it was yearning for. The rest of the cast were also pretty awful but I singled out Buzzington for being the absolute worst out of a pretty rotten bunch. The only person that I did enjoy was Jon Huber who played American soldier Lachlan Allsopp, I found his performance to be surprisingly decent considering the fact that acting isn’t what he’s known for. Jon Huber is also known as Luke Harper and is a wrestler who is signed to WWE and I’m a big fan of both the company and the wrestler but had no idea he featured in this movie until I saw him. Maybe I’m a little biased due to being a fan of his wrestling persona as I think people who don’t know him for being a wrestler may have found his performance to have been equally as bad as the rest but I’m sticking by my opinion that he was the only half decent performer involved in the movie, which speaks volumes for the quality of the others actors attached to this project.

In addition to the acting I felt that this movie lacked both horror and gore. I think if the movie was turned into a bloodbath with some awesome gory death scenes then it would have been a little more watchable but it never really panned out that way despite teasing glimpses here and there. I also think that the supernatural aspects of the movie were unnecessary as nothing was achieved by adding them to the film and for me it just made no sense as the movie limped to a very slow and anti-climatic finish which was made a little more confusing thanks to the addition of the supernatural. My final point before singing off was the movie made no real effort to develop any of the characters or give them the slightest bit of backstory. Each and every character was very one dimensional and generic that I really didn’t care for any of them.

Overall, Mohawk was woeful and if it wasn’t for Jon Huber/Luke Harper’s surprise performance this film would’ve received the embarrassing 1/10 mark, instead he managed to drag the movie up a point. Seriously, just don’t watch this trash.

2/10