523. Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid (1969)

Starring: Robert Redford, Paul Newman, Katharine Ross

Director: George Roy Hill

Running Time: 110 mins

Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid is an American film about two Wild West outlaws who are forced to flee to Bolivia when they discover there are expert trackers on their tale trying to bring them to justice.

This film is surprisingly good fun. It’s not only a classic story that’s exciting and fascinating to watch, but is also quite a comical and simple plot that makes it extremely enjoyable to watch.

There is one big problem with this film: how it started off. Apart from quickly bringing you the characters of Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid, the first 25 minutes are actually quite irrelevant to the remainder of the story, and are in fact pretty boring to watch, but it does improve from a disappointing and slow start later on.

As soon as you add in a little bit of unpredictability and peril into the story, it gets a lot more exciting. At the start, it seems as if all the stealing and holding up trains etc. is just too easy, and although that’s a historically true aspect of the story of The Hole In The Wall Gang, it’s not particularly enthralling.

Once the two begin to be pursued by the trackers, and are forced into the wilderness as a desperate measure of escape, the adventure is a whole lot more fun and exciting than the detailing of the history of the wild west gangs.

After a long, but highly entertaining period of running around the wilderness, the two escape to Bolivia, and the story rejoins them trying to settle into their new environment, which makes for some unexpected comedy.

The best part of all this is the difficulties of the thieves in trying to rob banks and various other establishments, but not being able to speak any Spanish, which means that they’re left completely dumbfounded at their attempts of any robberies.

Along with the simpler excitement and fun of the story, there are various fascinating aspects. Firstly, there’s the historical context, which brilliantly shows the powers of these gangs of outlaws in the wild west, which I found particularly interesting.

And then, there’s the brilliant relationship between Butch and Sundance. With Butch being the experienced and wiser man, and Sundance the slightly arrogant young hot-shot, it makes for evident sparks between the two, which is not only intriguing to see how it affects their relationship in remaining successful robbers, but is also again simply quite funny.

The ending, although it’s a classic, wasn’t actually particularly exciting, and didn’t compare to the sense of peril that the two were experiencing when the went to hide in the wilderness, so the film ended on a slightly disappointing note, however it remains an interesting and very entertaining film, so that’s why it gets a 7.9.