The Last of His Tribe

Hook's third feature (actually made for cable) has the same fine intentions as The Kitchen Toto and Lord of the Flies, and the same lack of narrative drive and originality. It stars Greene (from Dances with Wolves) as the 'Wild Indian', 'a free-ranging man of nature', the last of his tribe of Californian Native Americans, found robbing a slaughterhouse for sustenance in 1911. Voight is the San Franciscan museum anthropologist who takes him in, studies, and employs him. 'That man's soul is in your hands, Alfred,' he is told , a message he finally takes to heart, much in the way, presumably, Hook hopes the viewer may do. Unfortunately, the movie is so filled with clichés, so devoid of character development and insight, that it's hard to see anybody sustaining interest long enough to hang in for the film's sincere but bathetic denouement. Never have scenes suggestive of genocide been encased in such a vacuum.