Bone Tomahawk Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		4.0
Video		4.0
Audio		4.5
Extras		2.5
Overall		4.0

Bone Tomahawk Blu-ray Movie Review

Suck it, Best Buy.

RLJ Entertainment's recent expansion of catalog title Blu-ray Steelbooks continues with S. Craig Zahler's Bone Tomahawk, an ultra-violent Western first released on Blu-ray all the way back in 2015 and reviewed here. This is a small upgrade overall, offering vastly different design elements than the earlier release, identical disc content, and a DVD copy of the film. It's a low-risk purchase for collectors and a solid jumping-on point for newcomers.

Bone Tomahawk Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

For an overview of the 1080p transfer, please see the 2015 Blu-ray coverage linked above. Please note that I've scored it slightly lower since this is, after all, an eight year-old disc and held to a different standard.

Bone Tomahawk Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

For an overview of the DTS-HD 5.1 Master Audio track please see the 2015 Blu-ray coverage linked above.

Bone Tomahawk Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

This two-disc set ships in matte-finish Steelbook packaging that's slightly reflective and offers substantially different design elements than the 2015 Blu-ray. The cover art is less somber with a lighter, warmer, and painterly aesthetic that's actually closer in tone to a Western from several decades ago. The back cover features a similarly illustrative version of Patrick Wilson's character Arthur O'Dwyer from behind. Only the interior splash image features a still from the film: its core group of four pursuers on horseback. Both the Blu-ray and DVD, sporting the grim visage of Franklin Hunt (Kurt Russell) from the earlier release's cover, sit on overlapping hubs on the right side.

On-disc bonus features are identical to the 2015 Blu-ray and reviewed here.

Bone Tomahawk Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Writer/director/composer S. Craig Zahler's 2015 debut film Bone Tomahawk is a surprisingly effective Western full of slow-burning suspense and uncomfortable violence at critical moments, making for quite a solid start indeed. Zahler followed up with Brawl in Cell Block 99 and Dragged Across Concrete later that decade, and has since focused more on books and graphic novels. This new Steelbook offers only a cosmetic upgrade of Bone Tomahawk's well-rounded 2015 Blu-ray, although it also adds a DVD copy of the film. Not surprisingly, it's for collectors and newcomers only but, given the higher profile of this release in comparison to other RLJ titles, a 4K upgrade would've been ideal.