All The Pretty Horses
Billy Bob Thornton

Toby Kemp

Set in the borderlands of southern Texas and Mexico, where the Rio Grande draws a slow twisting score through the untamed land, All the Pretty Horses meandered through 117 uninspiring minutes of my life.

A young John Grady Cole (Matt Damon), after losing the small Texan ranch he had called home, sets out for Mexico with his buddy Lacey Rawlins (Henry Thomas) looking for adventure and a chance to work the fabled Mexican ranches where a man can ride for days without seeing another living soul. Along the way they are followed and then joined by a young runaway, Jimmy Blevins (Lucas Black) who Cole clicks is riding a stolen horse and carrying a stolen gun. They suspect the kid is trouble.

Blevins is separated from the others after a bizarre situation in which he has his horse stolen, and the two cowboys fall in with a group of vaqueros. John Grady falls hopelessly in love with Alejandra (Penelope Cruz), the lusty Mexican daughter of the rich ranch owner (Ruben Blades) he finds himself working for. This causes him all kinds of problems.

Blevins, not content with stealing his horse back, is impelled by the brashness of his youth or the fantasy of becoming a legend to return for his gun, which had been stolen along with his horse. Cole and Rawlins, who are still as yet blissfully unaware of this fact, have a rude awakening when they are quickly arrested, taken to jail, and told the kid had killed a man and they are all branded outlaw. This gets Blevins shot, unlawfully executed, and lands Cole and Rawlins in a dirty violent Mexican prison, where they are forced to fight for their lives before being bailed out by Don Hector the rich ranch owner, who likes Cole even if he would not tolerate a relationship between his daughter and a ranch hand.

The film eventually leads Cole on another journey, alone, and this time a journey of vengeance against the evil and corrupt Mexican police who shot Blevins. The story descends into true Hollywood-style closure.

Set in 1949, All the Pretty Horses is based on an award winning novel by Cormac McCarthy, the first in a series of three called The Border Trilogy. Thornton's film starts with promise, the two friends on horseback thunder out across beautiful landscapes into the unknown, as the camera sweeps majestically through the open mesas and plains. But the movie immediately becomes confusing. Scenes change from rolling landscapes to villages, day to night with no real noticeable continuity.

Matt Damon was born to play a cowboy, but the script and direction of the film made his character lifeless and dull. Cruz's role as the seductive Mexican love interest was bland - she was not given the depth or colour that the character, or Cruz as an actress deserved. She was merely there to pout and swing her hips. The cultural, racial and ethical concepts revolving around this relationship that were explored and discussed in the book were not even stumbled over. Rather, the camera treats her exquisite and exotic otherness as if it explains everything. Lucas Black's character Jimmy Blevins provides the only spark of life in an incredibly disappointing film, a spark that is all too quickly extinguished.

McCarthy's award winning-novel is deeply grounded in history, with a cleverly questioning religious subtext. It is his attention to detail and mouth-watering descriptions that make the story so rich and attractive and even the simple action of putting a saddle on a horse or rolling, lighting and smoking a cigarette. McCarthy sees Mexico as a Garden of Eden, a land of promise, where a man might fulfil his dreams, but where dreams are often paid for in blood. Thornton stubbornly manages to all but ignore this concept, and the beauty, strength, and durability of the human spirit that McCarthy describes so potently in his novel are sadly missing. McCarthy's novel is the well-told tale of young men facing hard times in a strange land. Thornton's movie unfortunately is not.