Blackthorn

I’m one of the few people who doesn't care for the 1969 George Roy Hill classic Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, but I like this follow up/alternate-history even less.  The film is not a sequel to the famous Paul Newman and Robert Redford picture, but a musing on what might have become of Butch if he had survived and lived to old age in Bolivia.  Sam Shepard seems the ideal actor to play the world-weary outlaw, but his performance is too self-aware and we never get the feeling we are watching a real character.  Perhaps this is the fault of the film itself, which seems more in love with the idea of Sam Shepard playing this iconic role than with the desire to explore the character of Butch beyond his popular history.  The movie is full of great cinematography but it is all scenery rather than imagery.  More than the George Roy Hill movie, the film I couldn’t get out of my head while watching this was Tommy Lee Jones’ 2005 Tex-Mex-Western The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, a far superior picture on some similar themes