accessAtlanta

Grade: C+

Verdict: Looks good, less filling.

Details: Starring Matt Damon, Henry Thomas and Penelope Cruz. Directed by Billy Bob Thornton. Rated PG-13 for violence and some sexuality. One hour, 58 minutes.

Rate it: Write your own review

Review: “All the Pretty Horses,” is a pretty darn good movie — for a while.

Based on Cormac McCarthy's novel of love, obsession and Mexican-American cultural clashes in the post-World War II Southwest, the film is initially blessed with interesting characters who speak in pitch-perfect Texas twangs.

Matt Damon, in a mostly solid performance, plays John Grady Cole, a rancher's son disillusioned when the family spread is to be sold after his grandfather's death. He hightails it on horseback to Mexico with lifelong pal Rawlins (played with vitriolic charm by E.T.'s grown-up buddy, Henry Thomas). They're the kind of folk who lay on the dusty earth at night, gazing at the stars, resting their heads on solid rocks while contemplating life in hard-edged sentences honed amid the everyday hard-edged work of driving cattle and breaking horses. “You don't think about heaven and hell?” one of them wonders. “I guess you can believe what you want to,” the other says. As Damon says in narration, “It's hard to watch the people close to you wasting right in front of your eyes.”

Along the way to Mexico, they run into a wiry young fireball named Blevins (Alabama-born Lucas Black). He's a suspicious little runaway whose beautiful, clipped retorts make for more than a few delicious scenes.

He produces a sizable revolver. And when Rawlins asks where did he get such a gun, Blevins, without missing a beat, shoots back, “At the gettin' place.”

“All the Pretty Horses” is directed by Billy Bob Thornton (“Sling Blade”) and, as you'd expect from this often amazing Southern-born talent, his film begins with a tacit understanding of place.

His cinematography glows with sweeping vistas of wide open spaces, the rocky spires of the red-rock West and slo-mo stampedes of muscled horses. At times, the lens is pointed at characters who speak directly into the camera in facial shots as up-close and dramatic as Jonathan Demme used in “Philadelphia” and “The Silence of the Lambs.” Thornton even focuses in on one character's eye, letting it completely fill the screen, like he was some human Moby Dick.

It's been a spell since movie lovers fully wrapped themselves in a western. Maybe not since “Lonesome Dove.” And for a good while, it seems like “All the Pretty Horses” could be that kind of western. Thornton aims toward attaining the epic nature of “Lawrence of Arabia,” and at times his film hints at the visual equivalency of William Faulkner's intricately worded “Spotted Horses.” But “All the Pretty Horses” is really just a nice try.

The movie deflates as soon as Damon spies Penelope Cruz, who plays the daughter of a Mexican horse baron on whose ranch our Texas pals find work. They are a stunning twosome, and we'll buy their instant attraction to each other. It's just that their resulting onscreen chemistry would hardly warm a can of beans.

What follows is a somewhat choppy tale of potentially lost love, trumped-up charges, a prison as welcoming as “Midnight Express,” torture, monied cultural pressure and death. Little of it does more than drag on. None of it contains the emotional pull of the movie's first half-hour.

It's a shame. Thornton reportedly brought in “All the Pretty Horses” at nearly four hours. It's been hacked to two. It feels like three — easy.

— Bob Longino, Cox News Service