‘The Thicket’ Review: Blood, Violence and Little Else in This Bleak Western

The search never ends for ways to make old genres like cowboy movies look fresh and different.  To this purpose, there is a shoot-em-up called The Thicket. No cowboys here, but it’s still a Western, with plenty of shooting. Call it a nouveau western, which means more psychology than action, and fewer saddle horses than arty rock formations.

One thing is the same: there’s no plot to write home about, slim hope for a happy ending, and among a multitude of characters, a parade of villains that outnumber the heroes. When their parents die from smallpox, Jack Parker (Levon Hawke) and his younger sister Lula (Esme Creed-Miles) are escorted by their grandfather to a ferry that will take them to the home of a guardian aunt.  But before they can cross the river, a vicious bank robber-serial killer called Cut Throat Bill (played by a woman, Juliette Lewis) kills Grandpa, kidnaps Lula, and drags her off to a remote landscape called The Thicket. The boy enlists the services of a bounty hunter called Reginald Jones (Peter Dinklage) and his accomplice, an ex-slave who digs graves for a living, to track down Cut Throat Bill and save his sister from a fate worse than death. (In addition to murdering half of the populace, Bill is also something of a pervert. She takes great pleasure forcing her terrified lady prisoner to strip, then curls up in her arms by the fire while she sleeps. Other female captives who refused Bill’s advances in the past, we are told, ended up with body parts strewn across the prairie.) On the journey to find Lula, Jack lands in a brutal fight in a town brothel and rescues a prostitute named Jimmie Sue (Leslie Grace), who joins the three men on their search and does her share of the killings.  

To pass the time and justify the film’s nearly two-hour length, director Elliott Lester and screenwriter Chris Kelley concentrate on loading everyone with enough oddball characteristics to convince jaded viewers who hate Westerns that they are watching something unique. The bounty hunter is a dwarf whose father sold him as a freak to a carnival show for $40 and two goats when he was just a child; his pride and joy is a rifle he drags around that was a gift from Annie Oakley. The film’s most outrageous and consistently interesting character is the savage Cut Throat Bill, played with evil, cackling glee by Juliette Lewis. Addicted to licorice, she slaughters everybody who has any, sucking and chewing her way through every scene—covered with scars, scowling with a septic grin, and speaking in a voice that sounds like a slow-moving tractor wheel. She’s over the top, but even though this is not the kind of movie that shows actors off at their best, it is the kind of film an actor can easily steal just by being hammier than everyone else—a job she manages quite well.

People speak in crude, clipped grunts, the dialogue blurred, along with the action and all muted attempts at character motivation and time frames meld uncomfortably. In one scene, Lula searches for a trace of plant life in the primitive west while a man in goggles flies by on a motorcycle, decades before the invention of the engine. It all plays out in a vast, snowy wasteland that is no phony setting. When the horses snort, the air fills with steam from their breath. There’s a lot of bloody action to satisfy the director’s need for photographing red blood splattered on white snow. It looks as bleak as it should and in spite of its pointlessness, there’s always something visual to admire.

By my calculation, only two cast members are still alive at the end of this movie, and I won’t reveal any spoilers about who they are or where they’re going, although I’m not sure what it is anyone could spoil about The Thicket.