Most tend to remember the late Val Kilmer for his roles in Batman and Top Gun but he had such a wide variety of films in his filmography from comedies like Top Secret to spy thrillers like The Saint. In 1992 he teamed up with Coal Miner’s Daughter and Guerillas in the Mist director Michael Apted for the crime drama Thunderheart co-starring Sam Shepard, Fred Ward, Chief Ted Thin Elk, Rex Linn and the late Graham Greene.

 

Thunderheart follows 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 Native American 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.

 

This is another of those films I remember seeing back when it first hit VHS when I worked at a video store but didn’t really pay attention to it. Revisiting it was like a new experience through more mature eyes and of course getting to see the late Val Kilmer in his prime is always a treat. The film is a well-done crime drama that follows a lot of the typical tropes of the genre, but the culture of the tripes and true nature to come of the horrors they faced elevated it to something else.

 

All the cast here are fantastic with the varying elders of the tribes being some of my favorite moments as they bring that true sense of culture and believability to the story. Kilmer is in top form as he works towards solving the case while dealing with his own connections to the culture and his past.