Here’s something different! Sam Shepard is Butch Cassidy in Blackthorn, a new film by Spanish director Mateo Gil. You might not be familiar with his directorial efforts as this is the first film he’s directed in the English language but, he’s also the writer of The Sea Inside(with Javier Bardem), Abre Los Ojos (Open Your Eyes) and its American remake Vanilla Sky (both starring Mrs. Bardem, Penelope Cruz) and Agora (with Rachel Weisz).

Blackthorn is the story of Butch Cassidy (now calling himself James Blackthorn and living in Bolivia after surviving the shootout with Bolivian Federales that killed The Sundance Kid) who pines for one last sight of home and his family before he dies and undertakes the long journey back. After a chance encounter, he finds himself aligned with a young robber and the duo become a target for gangs and lawmen alike.

There’s always room for a good old-fashioned western. The operative word being good. The genre does seem to be making something of a comeback although, since that seems to happen once a decade, the case can be made that westerns never really go out of vogue. In addition to this summer’s Cowboys & Aliens (which was at its core, a terrific western), in the last eight years alone we’ve had James Mangold’s remake of  3:10 to Yuma, Ed Harris’ Appaloosa and Kevin Costner’s Open Range. I’d stack any of those against anything by John Ford or  Andrew V. McLaglen. Sam Shepard, whose last western was 2007′s The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, with the mid-western twang of his voice full of whiskey and dust and long years and his craggy weather beaten face, seems perfectly cast  to take over the mantle of Butch Cassidy from Paul Newman. I’m willing to give this a shot, even if it did seem to come out of nowhere.

Here’s the full length trailer:

and a MovieWeb exclusive TV spot:

Blackthorn stars Sam Shepard, Eduardo Noriega, Stephen Rea, Nicolaj Coster-Waldau and Padraic Delaney. It comes to VOD today, September 2 but will get a limited theatrical release on October 7.

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