Word: butch
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...convict Butch Haynes (Costner) has just escaped from prison with his partner, who immediately breaks into someone's home to stock up on provisions. In the ensuing struggle, Haynes takes the mother's eight-year-old son, Philip (T.J. Lowther), as a hostage, and they're off to hit the road. Haynes cleanly commits what we later learn is his second and final murder, and the little boy soon learns where he must turn his loyalties. Their relationship is quickly transformed from captor/captee, to mutual symbiosis for practical survival, to a mentor/mentee on the facts of life, to something that...
...Butch Haynes (Costner), a "criminal's criminal," has broken out of jail along with Terry (Keith Szarabajka), a garden-variety psychopath. The convicts terrorize a mother and her children and take seven-year-old Phillip (T.J. Lowther) hostage. Tracking their flight is a Texas Ranger posse led by Eastwood, your basic righteous cowboy emeritus, and sparked by Laura Dern, a Governor's aide who brings feminist compassion and common sense to the pursuit. Bad guys, good guys, vroom-vroom...
...warped Shane. In that 1953 film, mysterious gunslinger Alan Ladd agrees to protect a homesteader's family against varmints and becomes a reluctant role model for the tenderfoot's young son. Here, Haynes is the bad guy, but he's mainly Shane. When Terry puts the make on Phillip, Butch avenges the assault. He gives Phillip lessons in backwoods manhood: how to smoke, cuss, dance, romance a waitress, drive a car, steal a car, rob a store and, of course, point a loaded gun at people you don't like. It's the blind leading the blind: Butch is trying...
...movie also gives Butch enough psychological backstory to explain most of his antisocial excesses. Seems his mother was a prostitute and his dad "beat the hell out of anything he ever came across, or screwed, or fathered." As abused children become abusive adults, so poorly parented Butch turns into a lame excuse for a father to Phillip. But the boy is ready to learn from, idolize -- and finally stand up to -- the first man who has taken a paternal interest...
...first stint as director since the Oscar-winning Unforgiven, Eastwood is pleased to let scenes amble in real Texas time, to let destiny fall slowly on Butch. Costner, though pulling a superficial switch on the pensive heroes he usually plays, is at such ease before the camera that Butch is made both compelling and agreeable. This World isn't perfect: it zigzags toward its climax and dodders in pathos when it gets there. But it's a handsome calling card for two Hollywood artists in prime form -- one at the high noon of stardom, the other in the tumbleweed afternoon...