Kilmer stars as Ray Levoi, a hotshot FBI agent who's thrust into a strange new world when he is sent to solve a murder on an Indian reservation. Hand-picked because of his part-Sioux ancestry, Levoi is teamed with a legendary older agent to capture a radical Indian protester. But once on the reservation, Levoi encounters the irreverent local sheriff, and the tribe's religious leader, who knows secrets about Levoi's own lost heritage. And as Levoi's awareness of the native culture grows, so does his belief that the U.S. government has framed an innocent man.
(23 votes)
2.
Tough but moving, Thunderheart is an unusual story about an arrogant FBI agent (Val Kilmer) who participates in a federal investigation of a murder on an Oglala Sioux reservation. Kilmer's character is part Sioux himself, a detail that leaves him cold as he sets about pushing his way through the community to find facts on the case. In time, however, he begins to feel an ethnic tug and grows increasingly sympathetic to the locals and hostile toward his fellow G-men, much to the dismay of his agency mentor (Sam Shepard). The script is based on real events that occurred on the Pine Ridge Reservation in 1975 in South Dakota (involving an armed standoff between Indian activists and the FBI, an event that prompted Thunderheart director Michael Apted to make a companion documentary, Incident at Oglala). The conclusion of Thunderheart feels like politically charged whimsy, but the real strength of the film is Kilmer's outstanding performance as a man in transformation. Apted's clear-eyed depiction of the Sioux's spiritual and cultural continuity with the past has none of the cloying romanticism of other films about Indians. Produced by Robert De Niro. --Tom Keogh
(20 votes)
3.
Agent Ray Levoi (Val Kilmer) buried his Native American heritage with the body of his drunken father. Raised by his white mother and stepfather, he becomes a gung-ho federal agent who never questions the authority of the U.S. government. Then Levoi finds himself in a real-life version of "cowboys and Indians" when the FBI moves onto a South Dakota reservation to apprehend a fugitive. Once in the community, the agent uncovers a plot to frame American Indian activists. With the help of an Indian sheriff and shaman (Graham Greene), he learns to accept a long-denied part of himself and to fight for his people. Created after the success of DANCES WITH WOLVES and LAST OF THE MOHICANS, director Michael Apted's film takes the buddy-cop genre and uses it to explore the sordid politics of reservation life in the United States. The film was released just weeks after Apted's documentary INCIDENT AT OGLALA, which examines the unjust imprisonment of Indian activist Leonard Peltier. Together the two films form a powerful plea for recognition of the mistreatment of Native Americans.
(20 votes)
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