Showing @ Filmhouse, Edinburgh, Fri 20 – Thu 26 Apr

Mateo Gil / Spain/US/Bolivia/France / 2011 / 102 mins

Blackthorn director Mateo Gil is clearly a man with a deep love for the western genre. There are elements and reflections in this movie of many of the great horse-operas of the past, from Fordian vistas and Houston’s Treasure of the Sierra Madre to the grizzled revisionism of Peckinpah. And inevitably there are several nods to George Roy Hill’s 1969 classic Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.

That film’s most famous scene is undoubtedly the sepia-tinted, freeze-frame ending where our two heroes burst out into the sunshine to face the guns of the Bolivian army – the image stops, the credits roll and the future is left, for Newman and Redford’s bandits, in limbo.

Gil’s film winds forward twenty years and posits the idea that the gringos somehow escaped their fate, with Butch at least managing to make a new life south of the border. This is where, at the start of the film, we find Sam Shepard’s grey haired horse breeder – now calling himself Mr Blackthorn and planning to return to the US to see the son he never knew. He’s detoured from his homecoming by crossing paths with a Spanish mining engineer (Eduardo Noriega) on the run from the mine owner he stole $50,000 from and who, for Butch/Blackthorn’s help and protection, is willing to split the loot.

There’s the making here of a good, straightforward western adventure and in part that’s just what this is. But where Gil falls down is in allowing his love for The Western and its potential to carry a message to overwhelm his job as a storyteller. Therefore, alongside the adventure we have the elegiac story of a way of life and code disappearing. It’s the tale of companionship founded in adversity: classic buddy movie territory with antagonism making way for deep friendship and of course the well worn trope of the outlaw as counter-culture hero. Unable to decide which story he wants to tell, Gil serves none of them fully.

That’s not to say there isn’t much worth praising here. Shepard has never been better and his taciturn, craggy portrayal of a bandit who feels the thrill of adventure rising in him again is a joy to behold. Noriega is a splendid, puffed up study in vanity and petulance, but it’s Stephen Rea in his cameo as an embittered lawman, sure of Cassidy’s survival and lost at the bottom of a bottle, who steals the show.

Within this mixed up picture there are some exquisite scenes and some strong, if not subtle, political points made. The twist in the tail is genuinely surprising and exciting, but it only manages to make you regret all the more that Gil hadn’t attached it to a more consistent film. The Western is a genre that many have a deep and abiding passion for and its films act as excellent barometers of the state of America – even when made by outsiders. What Mateo Gil has produced is an interesting, often beautiful and sometimes brave film, but, as is so often the case with grand passions, his love affair with the genre has left him blind to his film’s imperfections.