Blackthorn (2011)

BLACKTHORN  (2011)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Mateo Gil
    Sam Shepard, Eduardo Noriega, Nikolaj Coster-Waldau,
    Stephen Rea, Pádraic Delaney, Dominique McElligott
Anybody who's seen "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid" knows that the two outlaws died in a hail of gunfire at the hands of the Bolivian army back in the first decade of the 20th century. So, okay, what if it didn't happen that way? Like, suppose it's 20 years later and Butch is an old man raising horses on a ranch in Bolivia, and one day he gets word that Etta Place has died in San Francisco and decides it's finally time to go back home. The thing is, he's been away a long time, and getting back there, or even out of Bolivia, is not going to be easy. Sam Shepard plays Butch Cassidy in this, and it's not hard to imagine Paul Newman in the role - if Newman had still been around - late in his career. The movie's got a different vibe than the earlier film. It's more melancholy and less flippant. You can still see the wiseguy romantic in the old man, but the years have taken a toll. So it's a different kind of movie, but it's a good one, and it's one of those films you could watch just for the images director Gil and cinematographer Juan Ruiz Anchia put on the screen. The Bolivian landscapes are breathtaking. One quirk in the casting, though: Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, who plays young Butch in the flashback scenes, looks way more like Robert Redford than he does like Paul Newman.