Instead, you get a movie that's enjoyable enough, but leaves you feeling like it could have been much, much more.

This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

Not sure how, but this is easily one of the best movies all summer. Multiple levels of funny, never takes itself seriously, super colorful, and creative.

After playing with our expectations, this turns out to be a very different sort of film.

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.

"Nobody ever told us they were human." - Lt. Calley (My Lai hearings)An underrated thriller, Michael Apted's "Thunderheart" sees a young FBI agent (Val Kilmer) attempting to solve a series of murders on a South Dakotan Indian Reservation. The film was part of a wave of Hollywood pictures which attempted to delve into America's violent relationship with Native Americans ("Geronimo", "Dances With Wolves", "Last of the Mohicans", "Powwow Highway" etc).At its best, "Thunderheart" conveys well the way in which certain forms of violence echo through time and reverberate, loudly, in the present. Apted's Indian Reservations are run down, decrepit, and are at the mercy of modern "Colonialists", backed by the state. That a legacy of racist exploitation - racism is a key mechanism for the stabilization of capitalism and the legitimization of inequality - is alive and well in the present, is a lesson which our young FBI agent learns. Apted makes this most apparent during sequences in which car chases in the present are mirrored to military raids in the past, and in which the dead bodies of women echo the sand covered corpses of the Sioux and Cherokee. "They're a conquered people," one FBI agent says. "That means their future is dictated by the nation that conquered them." Unlike most films which uniformly "glorify" Native American Indians, "Thunderheart's" Indian Reservation is lorded over by different, warring sects. Some groups are fiercely "nationalist", some are well meaning, some are essentially power hungry dictators and others are beholden to the FBI, which for a long time ran illegal operations - offshoots of COINTELPRO - designed to disrupt Native Indian activists. "What makes you such a threat?" our hero asks one militant character. "We know the difference between the reality of freedom, and the illusion of freedom," comes the reply (from poet/activist John Trudell). "It's about power. They have to kill us because they cant break our spirit".Michael Apted's responsible for a number of documentaries, most notably "Up" and "Incident at Oglala", the latter also about deaths on an Indian Reservation. Like his best documentaries, "Thunderheart" is oft low-key, haunting and languid, though this tone frequently gives way to more heavyhanded brush-strokes: over-the-top violence, lots of "bad white man"/"good Indian" stereotypes, an overindulging in silly "spirtual/mythical" sequences and a generic last minute rescue. The film's climax, in which it is revealed that strip mining corporations are behind several murders, also reeks of "Chinatown", despite being a truth which occurs with frequency throughout history."Thunderheart" was shot by the renowned Roger Deakins. His aerial and night-time photography are excellent, the film's dialogue is often exceptional, and the film boasts fine performances by Graham Greene and Sam Shepard8.5/10 – Veers from powerful to cartoonish. See "Frozen River", "Lone Star" and "Hombre".

'Thunderheart' occasionally Hollywoodizes the Native American story in shallow, obvious ways, but overall it's a solid political thriller, with probably my favorite, most vulnerable performance by Val Kilmer, along with a great supporting turn by Graham Greene. While some of the bad guys are a little too obviously evil in a Snidely Whiplash, mustache- twirling way, and Kilmer's conversion from straight down the middle FBI man to sensitive, spiritual 'real' Sioux is a little quick and facile, the film still has more than it's share of tense, moving, and thought provoking moments. One of those ever more rare big Hollywood films that's still about something. Great photography by Roger Deakins.

"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