Sam Shepard, in his first movie lead in decades, saddles up as legendary outlaw Butch Cassidy in Mateo Gil’s gritty, elegiac Western. Despite the brief appearance of the Sundance Kid in flashbacks, this film couldn’t be more different in tone from George Roy Hill’s ebullient 1969 classic.
The film is set in 1928, 20 years after Butch’s presumed death in that famous shootout. Lying low for decades in South America under the assumed name Blackthorn, the grizzled old man decides he needs to return to the US to visit his family before his death.
Butch teams up with a Spanish mine robber (Eduardo Noriega) who promises him a cut of the loot. But there are lots of surprises — including an old nemesis (Stephen Rea) — during their grueling journey in this film, beautifully shot at striking locations in Bolivia.
With Paul Newman gone, you couldn’t ask for a better senior-citizen representation of Butch Cassidy than Shepard. In his best performance since “The Right Stuff’’ turned him into a reluctant movie star, Shepard makes “Blackthorn’’ worth seeing.