Oblivion (2013)

They Lied to You.  It’s Time to Learn the Truth.

When I went to the theaters to catch Star Trek, I had no reservations.  Today’s movie was less so.  I had seen the commercials for this movie and had an inkling of interest in the movie, but never enough that it would be the reason for me to make the trip to the theater.  Attaching it to a movie I wanted to see more made it much more palatable.  And I think it’s odd that I had no interest in this movie because I loved the game I assume it was based on.  In fact, I’ve loved the whole Elder Scrolls series.  I don’t know why they skipped past Daggerfall and Morrowind, but I’m still suspicious of how this game could be turned into a movie.  Do they just ignore all the side quests?  Otherwise, it would be way too long.  Well, we’ll find out as I review Oblivion, based on a graphic novel by Joseph Kosinski, written for the screen by William Monahan, Karl Gajdusek, and Michael Arndt, directed by Joseph Kosinski, and starring Tom Cruise, Andrea Riseborough, Olga Kurylenko, Morgan Freeman, Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, Melissa Leo, and Zoë Bell.

It’s the future so Earth is having a bad couple of days.  In 2017 the Earth was destroyed in a battle with some invading aliens when we decided to drop some nukes all over this bitch.  The surviving humans moved to a colony on Saturn’s moon Titan, with a few sticking around to repair survey drones to keep the remaining aliens (called “Scavs”) from destroying the fusion power stations that power the colony.  Two such humans are Tech 49 Jack Harper (Tom Cruise) and his partner Victoria “Vic” Olsen (Andrea Riseborough), Jack’s navigator who sits on her butt while he does all the work and chats with their weirdo mission Commander Sally (Melissa Leo).  Things are going smoothly and Jack and Vic are preparing to end their stay on Earth when Jack stumbles across a radio tower that summons a pre-invasion American spacecraft back to Earth, containing a sexy astronaut named Julia (Olga Kurylenko) that Jack has been having dreams about (but who hasn’t been?), as well as some secrets that will rock the foundation of Jack’s world.

My low expectations for this movie allowed it to exceed my expectations.  It didn’t blow any minds, but the story was solid, the look was great, and the performances all worked for me.  The biggest problem I had with the movie is that it had nothing to do with the game it took its name from.  No Daedra or anything!  What the movie is similar to is the Matrix, various post-apocalyptic movies, and Independence Day.  We fuck up the planet like a child breaking a toy so no one else can play with it.  Never really makes sense.  Man apparently has the resources to build a space station to escape on, but we’re so stubborn about not giving up our planet that we’ll destroy it first.  Either we win or everyone loses.  On the other hand, I could kind of see us doing that.  The story can kind of be slow going throughout, having not a whole lot going on other than watching Jack fix robots and having little hints at the larger story be revealed slowly.  I started getting bored around the halfway point, especially when it was going pretty heavy on the relationship stuff.  Julia showing up creates a love triangle between her, Jack, and Victoria that they really drained for all it was worth, and it wasn’t worth a whole lot to me.  The only thing it got out of me was a laugh at how much ‘splaining Jack was going to have to do to the two ladies.  ::SPOILER ALERT::  Then the movie turns into Independence Day because the big plan is to fly yourself into the mothership and blow up.  Not the greatest plan to be sure, but I’m sure Jack took solace in the fact that he had plenty of spares if his plan didn’t work out.  But I don’t know how that even got close to working in the first place.  Sally is a super smart computer intelligence, but she can’t figure out that something is amiss when Tech 49 rides up in Tech 52’s ship, even though they shouldn’t know each other exist?  The numbers are written on his shirt and the ship.  Infants and monkeys can tell if two things don’t match.  ::END SPOILERS::

The movie does very well with its look.  Everything is visually well-realized.  It looks dystopian while still being pretty beautiful and spectacular.  It shows a lot of imagination in the designs of everything, from the fusion plants to the ship that Jack flies to the tower he lives in.  A dystopian movie is always able to solicit a bit of a reaction by showing familiar landmarks like the Empire State Building buried up to the top floor in sand.  The action is fairly rare in the movie, but most of it is good.  I liked the fight between Jack and the Scavs in the library because the look of it reminded me of Gears of War, with 80% less raspiness.

I was not surprised by the quality of the performances in the movie so much as I was surprised by the quality of the actors they got.  I only knew one of them going into the movie, but I knew he was good.  The ones I didn’t know were in the movie were also as good as they usually are, but I didn’t know they were in it.  Tom Cruise is the only person I knew would be here, and he typically brings some quality.  I didn’t know who Andrea Riseborough was, but she was also pretty good.  I had no idea that Olga Kurylenko, Morgan Freeman, Melissa Leo, and the Kingslayer himself, Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, were in this movie, but they tend to be good as well.  Kurylenko helped make it easy for me to relate to Tom Cruise in this movie because I dream of Kurylenko too.  Who wouldn’t?  Morgan Freeman’s appearance was a bit bothersome to me at first, but only because he came off as a bad guy in the movie.  I don’t like Morgan Freeman as a bad guy.  He’s a great actor with a lot of range, but he’s just so likeable.  That was one of the main problems I had with the movie Wanted.  That and it being entirely mediocre.  Melissa Leo also did a good job.  Her role didn’t seem to require much out of her as she was just vaguely robotic, but also somehow bitchy.  And she got much more bitchy by the end.  They should’ve called her HAL-E from the way she looked at the end.  That’s not a WALL-E reference, but a HAL reference, just so we’re clear.  The only performances I really took issue with were those damned surveyor drones.  Those things were ungrateful pricks.

Oblivion was a fine enough movie, but perhaps not fine enough to inspire me to recommend that you see it in theaters.  The story was okay, but nothing spectacular and a little slow moving.  But the visual style and the performances were all impressive.  I could get behind recommending this movie as a rental eventually, but for the time being you can do without.  Oblivion gets “We won the war, but they destroyed half the planet” out of “Classic game.”

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Game of Thrones: Season Two (2012)

Any Man Dies With a Clean Sword, I’ll Rape His Fucking Corpse!

It stood to reason that I put out my review for Season Two of Game of Thrones a week away from my review for Season One since that is about the time it took me to finish both of them.  That may come as a bit of a spoiler to the eventual review of this season, but I don’t care.  I have a review to write and this is the thing that I’ve watched.  So let’s jump right into my review for Game of Thrones: Season 2, based on the novels by George R. R. Martin, and starring Peter Dinklage, Lena Headey, Maisie Williams, Sibel Kekilli, Michelle Fairley, Emilia Clarke, Aiden Gillen, Kit Harington, Alfie Allen, Jerome Flynn, Iain Glen, Charles Dance, Isaac Hempstead-Wright, Sophie Turner, Jack Gleeson, Stephen Dillane, Liam Cunningham, Richard Madden, John Bradley, Conleth Hill, Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, Gwendoline Christie, Rory McCann, and Carice van Houten.

Robb Stark (Richard Madden) continues his campaign against King Joffrey Baratheon (Jack Gleeson).  He sends Theon Greyjoy (Alfie Allen) to gain the support of his father, Balon (Patrick Malahide), and sends his mother Catelyn (Michelle Fairley) to seek help from Renly Baratheon (Gethin Anthony), who is fighting with his brother Stannis (Stephen Dillane) over who has claim on the throne.  Stannis has sex with the priestess Melisandre (Carice van Houten) when she promises to give him a son, which turns out to be a shadow creature that kills Renly, causing Catelyn to flee with Brienne of Tarth (Gwendoline Christie).  Robb tries to trade Jamie Lannister (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) for Sansa (Sophie Turner) and Arya (Maisie Williams) Stark.  And then Stannis sails against the King.  Also, Arya is posing as a boy while travelling back to Winterfell, gets taken hostage and taken into the house of Tywin Lannister (Charles Dance).  And, across the ocean, Daenerys Targaryen (Emilia Clarke) is trying to lead her people across a desert and they almost die before they finally reach the town of Qarth, where shit is also going down.

Here’s something crazy: the writers of this movie didn’t go on some crazy drug binge and decide to start ignoring the excellent material they were working with.  Seriously.  After two seasons of this show I’ve almost broken down and decided that I should check out these books.  And I hate reading!  But I’ll probably just wait until the DVD’s come out.  The second season was just as good as the first, and I refuse to decide which is better.  That’s not necessary for a review, right?  I would say that, in my opinion, this season didn’t have as much by way of emotionally impactful moments as the first season had.  Ned Stark was beheaded in front of his family in the first season.  This season didn’t have that.  It didn’t have Khal Drogo dying.  It had some great moments, but maybe I’m not thinking of them as much because the battle in episode nine was so epic it overshadowed the rest of them.  It was badass.  Disembowelments, ships exploding in green fire, and a feel of the battle of Helm’s Deep mixed with storming the beaches at Normandy.  The only part I took issue with was not really clearly understanding what happened to Dinklage at the end of it.  He seemed like he was fatally sliced in the face.  It didn’t really look like a fatal wound, but they tried to act like he might have died from it, probably for the cliffhanger.  But at first I thought they were going for one of those slow reveals where the top of his head slid off because the cut when all the way through his head.  There were other great moments in the story, like the tense part where Arya was trying to covertly serve drinks to Tywin Lannister and Petyr Baelish and not get recognized by Petyr.  There were also little parts that I didn’t care for.  The only one I can currently think of is the fact that episode five had two separate occasions where “You can’t avenge him when you’re dead” worked to convince people.

The performances are still fantastic.  They’re also the same people, so it’s not very surprising.  One thing I still find weird about Game of Thrones so far is that all I ever heard about the series before I started watching was how awesome Khaleesi was.  First off, her name isn’t Khaleesi like everyone made it seem like it was.  It’s Daenerys.  Emilia Clarke is sexy and great in the show, but she hasn’t made that much of an impact.  There was kind of a drought of her through most of this season, and the parts she was in weren’t always that interesting.  Wandering around a desert, then almost marrying a black man, then getting her pets kidnapped by the lead singer of REM, then they light that guy on fire and it’s the end of the world and he knows it.  But he feels fine.  She doesn’t even have much impact on the story in general, which is exemplified by the fact that she’s the only big character on the other side of the ocean.  The rest of the world in this show doesn’t even know she exists yet.  My favorite character in the series remains Maisie Williams as Arya.  I don’t know why, but I like this kid’s moxie.  And I like all the characters that are nice to her, like Tom Wlaschiha as Jaqen H’ghar.  I also think he reminds me of Gambit.  Plus he was the one that answered the question I kept asking early on: Why does no one realize Arya is a girl?  Why does no one say to Arya as she’s pretending to be a boy, “Little boy, you seem to be developing breasts.”  But then Jaqen and Tywin Lannister both figure it out, so maybe she just surrounded herself with stupid people.  I like Rory McCann as Sandor “The Hound” Clegane more in this season as well, mainly because of the part where he rescued Sansa from getting raped.  It was brutal and badass.  But later, I started thinking about how highly inconvenient it would be for a warrior like him to be afraid of fire when there would be so much of it in a typical battle in this time.  And the rescue situation started making me mad at Sophie Turner’s Sansa.  Why doesn’t she escape with The Hound?!  What kind of stupid Stockholm Syndrome is she developing that makes her stick around this castle?!  Lena Headey still brings it as Cersei Lannister in this season, but I liked her most when she was getting drunk during the big battle, and especially her line about a woman’s best weapon being between her legs.  They introduced two new characters in this season that I liked as well.  Natalie Dormer had one hell of a smokin’ hot body, but looked goofy wearing that waffle cone dress she wore (See picture below left).  And there was also Gwendoline Christie as Brienne of Tarth or, as I called her, Lady Tilda of Swinton (See picture below right).

Season Two of Game of Thrones was just as awesome as the first.  Not as emotionally substantial as the first, but it makes up for it with a fantastic battle in episode nine.  All of the performances are still top of the line.  Season Two became yet another overly expensive TV series I’ll have to buy on BluRay, and I recommend you all do the same.  Can’t wait for Season Three to hit the shelves.  Game of Thrones: Season Two gets “I much like my head.  I don’t want to see it removed just yet” out of “Those are brave men knocking at our door.  Let’s go kill them!”

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Game of Thrones: Season One (2011)

What Do We Say to the God of Death?

I have come to find recently that the quality of a show can be judged based on whether or not I have ever seen it.  Some of the shows I hear the most about  the quality of – your Walking Dead, your Breaking Bad, your Mad Mens – I have either never seen an episode or maybe only one or two.  But if I had never seen these TV shows how could I review them?  And if I hadn’t reviewed them, how would you all know if you like it or not?!  I have an obligation here.  I need to either let you people know if you can continue to love a show or if you need to burn your BluRays.  The first TV show I decided to take on was a show called Game of Thrones: Season 1, based on a series of novels by George R. R. Martin, and starring Sean Bean, Michelle Fairley, Richard Madden, Sophie Turner, Maisie Williams, Isaac Hempstead-Wright, Art Parkinson, Kit Harington, Alfie Allen, Mark Addy, Lena Headey, Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, Peter Dinklage, Jack Gleeson, Rory McCann, Aiden Gillen, Conleth Hill, Harry Lloyd, Emilia Clarke, Jason Momoa, and Iain Glen.

The Lord of Winterfell, Eddard “Ned” Stark (Sean Bean), is asked by his friend and king, Robert Baratheon (Mark Addy), to become his chief advisor.  Ned takes his daughters Sansa (Sophie Turner) and Arya (Maisie Williams), where Sansa is to marry the prince Joffrey Baratheon (Jack Gleeson), son of the Queen Cersei Lannister (Lena Headey).  Ned’s wife, Catelyn (Michelle Fairley), stays home with Bran (Isaac Hempstead-Wright), who is in a coma after he was pushed from a window by Cersei’s brother, Ser Jaime Lannister (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau), after he saw Cersei and Jaime having sex.  Incest-style!  Icky…  Across the Narrow Sea, Viserys Targaryen (Harry Lloyd) sells his sister, Daenerys Targaryen (Emilia Clarke) to the leader of the Dothraki warrior tribe, Khal Drogo (Jason Momoa), in hopes that the Dothraki will deliver him back to the throne he believes is his by right.  It may actually be his by right for all I know, because lots of people claim the throne belongs to them and it’s hard to keep up.

As it turns out, I was indeed and inexplicably avoiding the best shows on television.  This is a great show, and one that’s right up my alley.  I love the swords and sorcery, dungeon and dragons stuff.  That shit makes me wet.  You know what else does it for me?  Naked ladies.  This show’s got it all!  I liked this show so much that I bombed through the first two seasons as quickly as I could, watching during all of my free time.  Of course there was stuff that bugged me, but it seemed all intentional.  For instance, I don’t like when shows don’t work out exactly as I’d like them to for the people I like.  Of course, the show would be over pretty quickly if Ned and the Daenerys got married and lived happily ever after as king and queen in the first season.  The same goes for my strong desire to see Joffrey get what’s coming to him shortly after I first saw him.  He’s a driving force in the second season as well, but I still don’t think I’ve seen him get the comeuppance that he needs.  I also thought I was going to call some bullshit on the show when they suggested that Tyrion Lannister was the one that put the hit on Bran and sent the assassin using a knife that could so easily be tracked back to him, but the show was aware of that and Tyrion had been set up.  You win this round, Game of Thrones.  I still feel safe calling bullshit on the guy in the Night’s Watch for saying that Jon Snow was only fit to clean the armory because he was also pretty good at beating the shit out of all of his other trainees single handedly.  The only real problem I’ve had with the story is that I got attached to Syrio Forel, the sword instructor for Arya, because we don’t know what happened to him.  Of course, with how well this story’s been written so far, I wouldn’t be surprised if this was intentional too.

There’s not a whole lot to say about the production value of this show.  It’s fantastic.  Quite frankly, I’d call it impressive.  This is movie quality work going on in this TV show.  I remember a time when you could clearly tell the difference between TV and movies, but now it’s really blurred, especially when it comes to TV on HBO and channels of the like.  You get fantastic blood and guts in equal measure to some nice titties.  I cannot complain.

All of the performances are excellent in this show.  Sean Bean tears it up, even though his character’s name doesn’t seem to fit in the medieval setting.  Granted, his name is actually Eddard, but everyone calls him Ned.  Ned Stark seems like the first pass at naming Iron Man.  I was also a big fan of his daughters.  Sansa because she’s hot and Arya because of potential for future hotness.  Maisie Williams is far too young for hotness now, but she supplants it with tons of Moxie and I love her for it.  And Sophie Turner does a great job as Sansa, but I kept hating her for her behavior.  Even though I love animals, she deserved to get her dog killed for lying to the king and letting her sister get in trouble.  I just don’t understand her motivations.  That little shit Joffrey doesn’t deserve any kind of affection, even if you’re betrothed to him.  Is it just because he was in some of the Nolan Batman movies?  Look, I love him for that too, but the amount of asshole he is in this show overrides that.  I found myself having trouble for the first part of this season understanding why people liked Daenerys Targaryen.  Emilia Clarke does a great job at it, and is hotter than all get out, but I didn’t see anything special about her character at first.  It wasn’t until about halfway through the season that I started seeing what everyone was going on about.  That’s when she started getting badass.  When she gets her three new pets, I was cemented in a little more.  I also really dug Jason Momoa as Khal Drogo.  He was badass.  But, again, nothing good ever happens to the people I like.  I also understood pretty quickly why people talked up Peter Dinklage.  He was really the only likeable Lannister.

Definitely happy I started getting into Game of Thrones, and happy that I work with someone nice enough to be able to supply me with the first season like my friend Ashley.  And I’m also resentful for that douchebag roommate that forgot to bring his copy home with him so I could’ve gotten started early.  But I’ll probably have to resend that statement because he has season two.  Ah, I’m just kidding.  I already watched it all.  This show has a great, intricate story with lots of badasslery and intrigue, and enough tits and blood to go around, and an all-around great cast to realize it all with.  Season one is a must watch, and season two is even better, and you can check that review out whenever I get around to writing it.  Game of Thrones Season One gets “I’m good at killing fat boys.  I like killing fat boys” out of “Winter is coming.”

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Mama (2013)

A Ghost is an Emotion Bent Out of Shape.

I was very excited to get back to the theaters recently. Actually, at the time of writing this, I WAS happy to get back to the theaters about two weeks ago. When I saw Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters, I was able to make it a double feature. But I didn’t find a great amount of talent in the theaters. I really wanted to see Zero Dark Thirty, but Hansel & Gretel’s run time cut too deep into the start time of that movie to make it. But there was another movie that tickled my fancy. That’s probably a little too gay of a way to say that, but it was true. I did not expect much out of this movie based on what little I knew about it. I knew only two people involved with the movie. One of the producers of the movie has made movies that have not impressed me with their story, but always had a great visual style to them. And one of the actresses was in The Help and Zero Dark Thirty. That has nothing to do with anything. But let’s see how it turned out when I went to see Mama, based on story by Andres Muschietti who also directed and co-wrote, co-written by Neil Cross and Barbara Muschietti, and starring Megan Charpentier, Isabelle Nélisse, Jessica Chastain, Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, Daniel Kash, Javier Botet, and Hannah Cheesman.

During a financial crisis that apparently happened in 2008, a man named Jeffrey (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) overreacts a tad by killing his business partners, his estranged wife, and kidnapping his two children – 3-year old Victoria (Morgan McGarry) and 1-year old Lilly (Maya and Sierra Dawe) – taking them on a drive to an abandoned cabin where he’ll probably kill them too. Before he gets the opportunity, something grabs him, pulls him out of frame, and kills the bejesus out of him. Also arguably a bit of an overreaction. Five years later, Jeffrey’s brother (who is also him), Lucas (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau again) is going broke searching for them. His search crew finally stumbles across the children, still alive but almost entirely feral, and now being played by Megan Charpentier and Isabelle Nélisse. After a psychiatric rehabilitation, the girls’ doctor, Dr. Gerald Dreyfuss (Daniel Kash) suggests that the girls live with Lucas and his girlfriend Annabel (Jessica Chastain). But there’s a problem. The girls seem to have manifested a protector that they call “Mama” … OR HAVE THEY!?!?!?

I kinda liked this movie, but that may also have been mainly because I had just seen Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters. This movie was better than that one, but I wouldn’t necessarily call it a good movie. Just good by comparison. With time, I find that I’m getting better at predicting my feelings about movies as my movie-watching wang becomes more prodigious. Turns out, when I see Guillermo del Toro’s name associated with something and I instantly assume I’ll be unimpressed with the story but find the visual style pretty interesting, it’s a pretty safe assumption. It’s not bad, but it’s also nothing special. It’s a ghost story two feral kids. I think one of the biggest points of contention I had was that I never understood Mama’s motivations. I realize that she was the ghost of a crazy person, but shouldn’t she appreciate the people that were taking care of the children that she loved? I understand the possibility that Mama would get jealous that the kids were liking the living family better than the creepy ghost lady, but why would she try to kill them when they were treating the kids well? I also didn’t understand the people that acted like they shouldn’t be a little bit cautious around the kids. Sure, the kids are really young, but even young kids can pick up a knife and stab someone to death in their sleep. And, since they were feral, they probably wouldn’t even realize that killing these people in their sleep was wrong. That’s just survival to them. I also didn’t understand how Annabel was so against the kids. I would’ve though those feral kids were rad! They’re like tiny, female Wolverine’s!

The visual style of the movie was very effective. That is all. Moving on.

As with many movies, I don’t pass a lot of judgment on the performances. They all did really good jobs. What I do take issue with more often is the characters themselves. Jessica Chastain did a good job, and I was happy to see her looking Goth because she’s much more attractive with visible eyebrows. But I was also disappointed that she wasn’t a more likeable character. She really didn’t want anything to do with these kids. That probably stemmed from her trying way too hard to be a badass rocker chick. This was cemented for me when we heard her answering machine message. It was like, “Hey, this is Annabel. I’m not here. Leave a message or whatever. Then fuck yourself. Party on, Wayne.” It’s the sign to me that neither Chastain nor the writers of this movie are rockers in the slightest. I also liked Megan Charpentier and Isabelle Nélisse as the feral girls. They did cute and creepy in equal degrees of quality.

I enjoyed Mama, but I’m also aware of the fact that it wasn’t that substantial. It was just super passionate about being mediocre. The story was nothing special and the characters were hit and miss, but the people playing those characters and the art director did a great job. I cannot really recommend this movie for purchase or viewing in the theaters, but I’d get behind recommending a rental. A dollar at RedBox is right up its alley. Mama gets “What’s under the bed?” out of “Leave a message after the beep. Fuck you. Beep.”

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Blackthorn (2011)

Everything Else is Just the Middle

Nothing in particular drew me to watch today’s movie besides my love of a good Western.  I had seen a trailer for it before one of my recent reviews, but had not heard anything about the movie before that.  It is a Western, to be sure, so I was interested, but I admit to having next to no knowledge of the character the movie is about.  I’ve not even seen the biggest movie that is based on the exploits of this character, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.  But something still seemed interesting about the movie and the fact that it’s available on Netflix streaming just cemented the idea that I should watch it today.  Also, I had nothing else to watch.  So let’s hear about Blackthorn, written by Miguel Barros, directed by Mateo Gil, and starring Sam Shepard, Eduardo Noriega, Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, Padraic Delaney, Stephen Rea, Magaly Solier, and Dominique McElligott.

In the realsies, Butch Cassidy (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) is said to have been killed in 1908, but these claims have never really be substantiated.  This movie suggests that he is alive and well twenty years later, going under the moniker of James Blackthorn (Sam Shepard), living in Bolivia, and bangin’ a lady named Yana (Magaly Solier).  Blackthorn decides to return to the United States when he learns of the death of his old friend Etta Place (Dominique McElligott) and to visit her son (and his), Ryan.  When he goes to sell some horses, he is ambushed and his horse is scared off, along with all of his money.  The money wasn’t scared off, I mean the horse was and his money was on the horse.  You know what I mean!  Anyway, Blackthorn confronts his attacker, a Spaniard named Eduardo Apodaca (Eduardo Noriega), who explains that he is being chased and thought Blackthorn was one of them.  Apodaca asks if he can accompany Blackthorn, telling him that he’s hidden $50,000 that he stole from a Bolivian industrialist, and Blackthorn can have half of it if he helps him.

I don’t know if I wasn’t paying attention or if I really just had nothing come to my attention about this movie, but I took not a single note about this movie as I was watching it.  I’m pretty sure this is the first time that’s ever happened.  Well, since I took no notes, this review is over.  The movie’s okay.  The end.  Okay, I’ll go a little deeper into it than that, but keep in mind that the 60’s were pretty rough on my brain.  This movie was indeed “okay”.  It wasn’t all I hoped for, but it was good enough.  I’ve had pretty good luck with Western’s thus far in my life, having almost exclusively seen really good ones.  I tend to prefer the ones that are closer to action movies like Tombstone and the Quick and the Dead.  This one wasn’t that.  It was a lot more talkie and a lot slower paced, like Unforgiven and the Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford.  Okay, I just really wanted to write that long ass title.  It’ll pad out my review!  Blackthorn was interesting enough, but a little slow moving and didn’t really make me want to pay that much attention for some stretches.  It’s mostly about an old guy trying to tolerate a Spanish guy so that he can get paid.  Blackthorn also has a lot of flashbacks through the movie about his time with Sundance and Etta, but they never really seemed to have a whole lot to do with what was going on in the main plot.  It seemed like someone was either a really big fan of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and really wanted a sequel, or someone just wanted to perpetuate the myth that he didn’t die in a shootout in Bolivia.  Maybe both.  Having no knowledge of the movie and no particular affection for Butch Cassidy, the movie had to make do on its own merits.  It does it well enough, and has at least one pretty good action scene, but it was slower paced than I was interested in.  The look and settings were all pretty great.  They had a Western feel to it, but were just different enough because it was Bolivia.  It felt like a Western, but looked a little different at times.

I can’t really come up with any complaints about the performances in this movie.  They were all really good.  Not super fantastic, but really good.  Sam Shepard seemed to be perfectly cast as the older, grizzled Butch Cassidy.  He was a pretty good badass.  Eduardo Noriega was sometimes a little annoying, but he should have been as the antagonist of the movie.  And that’s basically the entirety of the cast.  Everyone else was fine, but I don’t have more to say.

Blackthorn’s a pretty good movie for a slower-paced Western, but that wasn’t really what I was in the mood for at the moment.  The story was good, but slow and boring in parts, with flashbacks that seemed unnecessary.  The look of the movie, as well as all of the performances, are very enjoyable.  Though it doesn’t apply to me, if you were a big fan of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, you’ll probably really enjoy seeing what (allegedly) happened after it.  If you’re like me and know nothing of Butch Cassidy, but enjoy a good Western, you’ll probably think the movie is fine.  It’s available on Netflix streaming if you want to roll the dice.  Blackthorn gets “I wonder how this movie did at Sundance” out of “You don’t get any richer than that.”

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