Walking Thunder

This is the sort of 'great outdoors' movies that you can watch once, enjoy, and then promptly forget about. The movie provides a good sweep of Colorado, and the story - about a family trying to catch up with the gold rush - passable. However, when all the humans on stage are out acted by Bart the Bear, you know you are watching a straight-to-video movie. John Denver, the only recognisable actor, stares into space for long periods of times (probably writing a song for his next album), and all the others are Legends of the Fall rip-offs. However, the most amusing sequence in when Denver erects and furnishes a cabin in about an hour. Don't let me put you off, this is lightweight entertainment and good fun when there are nothing but repeats on the T.V.

Best Bit: Bart the Bear's dramatic drooling.

I agree with the former reviewer about the cabin. I mean, they are trapped in the wilderness because this guy, who can build a log cabin in one day, CAN'T FIX A WAGON AXLE BEFORE WINTER! Sheesh, believable. I'm sure wagon axles were a lot tougher to make than houses.

You also may not want to show it to impressionable young Indian kids, since some characters use derogatory language and racial slurs, and the one Indian character is something of a stereotype.

The movie won't make you laugh or cry, but it won't kill you with boredom either, and if you have the hour and a half to kill, there are worse things to watch out there. Bart the Bear is always good, and there are a few charming moments.

This is a great adventure, with big brassy exciting score. The golden leaves of autumn in the mountains are breathtaking. An unbelievably enormous bear attacks a covered waggon, and demolishes it, even breaking the axle, leaving the family in a major survival predicament.

The movie teaches some pretty silly lessons. It goes to great lengths to make this appear to be a true story. Yet it teaches fate -- that the outcomes of conflicts are decided in advance. It teaches there are bear deities who interfere in the affairs of man, both to destroy and help. It teaches that shamans have magic powers.

A boy is sent with the family fortune to buy a cow for milk for a expected infant. (I don't think people fed cow milk to infants back then.) Instead he buys a rifle. The second rifle comes in handy fighting off "burglars", and the boy is credited with amazing foresight instead of gross disobedience.

The "burglars" are mentally challenged, and over the top crazy evil in the style of Peter Pan's pirates or Blazing Saddles. They imagine a frontier family stranded in the mountains has sacks of gold, and cannot be dissuaded.

The director repeatedly puts small cuddly baby animals in the rifle sites, pauses, then the execution is aborted for a variety of reasons. It a mean-spirited teasing of the younger audience who think he will carry through.

The John Denver plays the bespectacled father, a secondary role. His kids won't mind him or respect him. His wife berates him for his lack of skill and their current predicament. His kids compare him with a mountain-man who helps them out, and Pa comes up lacking, though he eventually earns respect by defeating a desperado in a fist fight (though the desperado has a huge knife). This outcome is as improbable as Woody Allen taking out Mohammed Ali in 1972 given that Pa has never been in a fist fight before.

Mom wears lipstick. Dad and the mountain man are partly cleanshaven. A single barrel of something not destroyed by the bear seem sufficient for a family of four plus two guests for a winter. Really?

There are black, white, native, French, etc. characters, all living a somewhat dissolute and riotous life in shanty towns. There is one scene of drunken prostitution that might frighten off a Christian viewer. This melange is one part of the movie that was close to factual.

I really enjoyed the family movie "The Long Road Home" by prolific family filmmaker Craig Clyde, so I sat down to watch Clyde's "Walking Thunder" with some enthusiasm. Sad to say, this particular effort is pretty disappointing. Like TLRH, this movie didn't have much of a budget; there's little in the way of production values, unless you count the admittedly spectacular Utah scenery. But TLRH had things to make up for the low budget like a solid script and good acting. This particular script is lumbering and padded out. (And what's with the set-in-present bookends? They don't add anything to the story!) The acting by the almost totally amateur cast is pretty mediocre. The one star in the cast (if you don't count narrator Brian Keith), John Denver, seems bewildered by his surroundings. About the only positive things to say about this exercise are the pretty good musical score and a balanced view about how Native Americans were in the frontier west. But these things aren't enough to prevent kids as well as their parents from fidgeting in their seats while watching this.

Entertainment Tonight previewed this wonderful little film as being the last thing John Denver made. It makes me sad to think this wonderful entertainer is gone from this world and will never make anything else for us to enjoy. I wish his role could have been larger and broader. He was a great actor in addition to being a great singer. We miss you in this world, J. D.