Tetrady
not as good as all the hype
Mischa Redfern
I didn’t really have many expectations going into the movie (good or bad), but I actually really enjoyed it. I really liked the characters and the banter between them.
Neive Bellamy
Excellent and certainly provocative... If nothing else, the film is a real conversation starter.
Stephanie
There is, somehow, an interesting story here, as well as some good acting. There are also some good scenes
Robert J. Maxwell
A murder has taken place on the Sioux's Pine Ridge Reservation in the Dakotas. Since it's a major crime, it falls under the jurisdiction of the FBI, which is superordinate to the Tribal Police.The FBI sends Val Kilmer to investigate, under the supervision of his chief, Sam Shepherd. Kilmer finds that he's in the middle of a kind of tribal civil war, with two factions -- one cooperating with the government and the other a nativistic movement whose goal is to return to the traditional lifeways of the Sioux.Supporting characters are the head of the tribal police, Graham Greene, and the Indian school marm, Sheila Tousey, a graduate of Dartmouth. Things get complicated as an outsider, Fred Ward, is found to be drilling for uranium on the reservation. A find would demolish the place in the interests of national security.The photography captures the weird beauty of the South Dakota badlands perfectly. One wants to wander alone among the cinerous buttes, pinnacles, and spires. It makes your head reel, as I know.The apparent squalor of the Oglala reservation is also nicely sketched in. The houses are unpainted, tumbledown shacks with burlap curtains. Deceptively suspect, they're not really uncomfortable inside, and the discarded bedsprings and the skeletal furniture on the lawn are of no importance to the residents. They abide.Kilmer's FBI agent, it turns out, is part Sioux himself, although he's disavowed his ethnic roots because of his old man's drunkenness. His acting is of the usual professional character. Sam Shepherd is Sam Shepherd, in life an avant-garde playwright whose work is subtle but unnerving. Graham Greene delivers as the Indian sidekick. And there is one of those mystical but savvy old Indian men, all brown and wrinkled; in this instance, Ted Thin Elk. He slouches along is the most endearing way.Shiela Tousey is the kind of "native" woman who shows up in movies from time to time and is usually a hereditary princess or something. Ordinarily, the character is staggeringly beautiful, which makes it easier for the hero to fall in love with the girl, even if she must die at the end to prevent interracial marriage and justify the hero's blowing the villain's heads off. It's okay to schtupp them but you can't marry them. Fortunately, Shiela Tousey is not some Miss Nicaragua of 1995. She's rather zoftig and her facial features are sharp and penetrating. I don't know about anyone else but this parade of Miss Nicaraguas has gotten tiresome. Let's hear it for ordinary looking minority babes.The movie is just about undone by a familiar mistake on the part of the writer and the director, a mistake that John Huston deftly avoided in "The Man Who Would Be King." The Indians here have a bond with the earth. The wind tells them things. The owl is a messenger. They have visions that come true.In fact, they don't have more visions than the rest of us although customs of the past are present all over the place. As an anthropologist I lived with, and studied, four Indian tribes including two of the Sioux's neighbors on the high plains, the Blackfeet and the Cheyenne. What visions they may have, come from the occasional peyote ceremonies that are religious in nature, not at all recreational. That they have a bond with the earth that most of the rest of us can never know is unquestionable. The Cheyenne reservation at Lame Deer, Montana, abounded with sacred springs decorated with lavender ribbons and little bags of Bull Durham tobacco. They loved to eat boiled ribs (resembling buffalo) and potatoes (prairie turnips) and despised the TUNA FISH SANDWICHES. Well, let me not get into it.That big mistake -- introducing mysticism and preternatural powers -- almost blows the rest of the movie away, aside from the fact that the narrative itself is confusing and sometimes seems pointless. Even Graham Greene, who knows his way around outside "the res" is given the powers of Sherlock Holmes. He can tell if a man carries a pistol strapped to his ankle by the way he walks. He can tell a man's weight by the depth of his footprint in the dust. Whew.If you can put all of that aside and not worry so much if a few scenes lead nowhere, then you can sit back and enjoy the scenery, the occasional bursts of violence, and its omnipresent threat. The final shot is nicely done. Kilmer, having rediscovered his roots, drives off the reservation on a dusty road that abuts a highway. The car stops. It could go either way. But it doesn't move. Fade.
Michael Neumann
Val Kilmer plays a gung-ho FBI rookie and half-breed Sioux Indian who rediscovers his cultural heritage in the Badlands of South Dakota, while investigating a series of inter-tribal murders. The film is a well-meant but heavy-handed crowd-pleaser with a message, delivered by director Michael Apted with all the glossy, heartfelt sincerity of a sledgehammer blow. John Fusco's busy screenplay all but apologizes for every injustice against Native Americans dating back to the first voyage of Columbus, but 500 years of grievances can't be resolved in a single, two-hour melodrama and still leave time for all the car chases. The film as a result wavers between being an obvious social studies lesson (from which Apted could have made an interesting documentary) and pure Hollywood claptrap, complete with routine doses of gunplay and arcane Indian mysticism. Saving graces include natural performances by Sam Shepard and Graham Greene, and Roger Deakins' beautiful cinematography, showing just why the South Dakota landscape is sacred to the native Sioux.
merklekranz
"Thunderheart" would not even be an average movie without Graham Greene's wonderful performance. As reservation sheriff, his character correctly interprets a brutal murder using both mysticism and logic. Val Kilmer eventually realizes that his fellow F.B.I. agent is leading him on a road to nowhere, and that Graham Greene is onto the truth behind the killing. At almost two hours, the film seems endless, and only Graham Greene's humorous observations, break the sometimes monotonous and sometimes confusing story. The totally acceptable acting, interesting music, and beautiful locations help. The conclusion actually saves the movie, because up to that point, the whole thing seemed to be losing momentum. - MERK
Lee Eisenberg
In 1992, director Michael Apted released two accounts of the American Indian Movement: there was the documentary "Incident at Oglala" about Leonard Peltier, and the feature film "Thunderheart", loosely based on the Leonard Peltier case. This one features the ancestrally Indian Val Kilmer as an ancestrally Indian FBI agent investigating events in Pine Ridge in the 1970s and getting more interested in his own indigenous heritage.If absolutely nothing else, this movie should call to mind the history of Native Americans. They discovered America, but we don't admit it because they didn't colonize the Americas for another country. The Indians have gallantly fought against terrorism since October 12, 1492, while we act as if terrorism only emanates from the Middle East. They're reduced to running casinos to stay alive. For the record, at least some Indians don't like the word "tribe", preferring "nation".All in all, I really recommend this movie. Also starring Sam Shepard, Graham Greene, Fred Ward, John Trudell and presidential candidate Fred Thompson (I would never expect a creep like him to star in a movie like this, but he did, and later starred in "Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee").