Blackthorn

Blackthorn picks up where the original Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid movie had left off. Well, sort of.

In the 1969 movie, both Butch and Sundance apparently were killed in a standoff with the Bolivian military in 1908. Butch Cassidy, however, survived and – twenty years on - has now morphed into Sam Shepard… quietly living out his old days in a secluded Bolivian village and going by the name of James Blackthorn.
Tired of his long exile from the US and eager to see his family again before the grim reaper catches up with him for good, Blackthorn withdraws his savings from the bank, sells his horses and embarks on the epic journey home. Things start to go wrong, however, when he has an unexpected encounter with ambitious and dodgy Eduardo Apodaca (Eduardo Noriega) – a young Spaniard mining engineer who claims he was shooting at pursuers. During the shooting, Blackthorn’s horse bolts off, with the savings still in the saddlebag. In a bid to spare his life, Eduardo then offers to share a large sum of money he stole from a powerful Bolivian mine owner and which is hidden in an abandoned mine.

En route, a posse follows both men. Eventually they make it back to Blackthorn’s cabin, where he intends on spending one last night with his young Indio lover, Yana (Magaly Solier), before leaving Bolivia for good. The following morning they are ambushed by two female members of the posse and in the rain of bullets, Blackthorn gets wounded and Yana gets killed. Nonetheless, Blackthorn and the Spaniard escape once more and after various hurdles they manage to shake off other members of the posse before deciding to split up. Blackthorn reaches the town of Tupiza and is treated by a doctor. The doctor, in turn, notifies a certain Mackinley (Stephen Rea), formerly of the Pinkerton Detective Agency and now also living a quiet life in Bolivia, of his ‘patient’. Mackinley must now decide whether to leave old stones unturned or notify the army that the wanted outlaw is badly injured and in Tupiza.

Blackthorn is not a movie in the vein of its predecessor – there are no train robberies, daring ‘jumping from a cliff into a river’ stunts or potential hits such as ‘Raindrops keep falling on my head’. Blackthorn is deliberately on a slower pace and integrates the challenging and beautiful Bolivian landscape into its plot as if it were one of the characters. Poker playing and whiskey swigging are frequently replaced by the chewing of coca leaves – the drug du jour of its day. Here, poncho-clad Indios ride as well on llamas as they do on horseback, and they ride even better along the great Salt Lake!

Sam Shepard, as expected, gives a great performance as the once notorious but now retired outlaw – reflecting (in flashback sequences) on his young days with the Wild Bunch and his former love, Miss Etta Place. Brutal action cuts through Blackthorn’s reflective journey like a sudden blizzard cuts through the Andes. Likewise, Eduardo Noriega is in top form as the double-crossing weasel Apodaca (think a young version of Eli Wallach in ‘The Good, The Bad and The Ugly’). With his dynamic persona, he’s the perfect counterpart to Shepard’s laid-back, introvert character.

Director Gil Mateo states that what he likes most about Westerns is it’s truly moral genre – with the characters facing life and death, and other very important matters in very pure and simple terms. While Blackthorn still bears the occasional cliché, like the lone cowboy riding into the sunset (symbolically speaking), the movie as a whole is an accomplished piece of work with a gritty ‘arthouse’ feel to it.