You don’t need to sell me on Thelma & Louise; it’s been on my list of favorite movies as long as I’ve had one. When we studied it in my college screenwriting class, the professor rightly called Callie Khouri’s Oscar-winning screenplay “flawless.” When it appeared on the schedule for Movies at H’art Museum—a charming summer program that screens movies in the museum courtyard—it was a no-brainer.

Which made me all the more surprised that, seeing it for the first time in a decade, I just couldn’t believe how great it was. It might be Ridley Scott’s best. We should be talking about this movie all, the, time.¹

My memory of the movie had a specific flaw that directly related to how I was managing to underrate it. To simplify, there’s two categories of “buddy” protagonists: you’ve got your odd couples (Kermit and Fozzie, Eve and Villanelle) and your peas in a pod (Bill and Ted, Romy and Michele). Thelma and Louise start the movie as best friends and are literally never separated by more than a few feet, so in my memory they were a lightly-bickering pair of peas, complete with with a green convertible as their pod. 

I was wrong.

It’s kind of charming to me that after 50 damn years of filmmaking, it’s still a coin-flip whether a Ridley Scott movie is going to be good or not. Sir Ridley’s not like Steven Spielberg, who mostly keeps knocking them out of the park; nor Cameron Crowe, who released “Almost Famous” and then forgot how moviemaking works. He tiptoes down the middle, daring you to believe in him with an “American Gangster” and then pooping out a “Robin Hood.”  

So you’d be forgiven for thinking a lega-sequel to his 2000 blockbuster “Gladiator” would fall on the poop side of the line. It seems like nobody outside of the Hollywood bean-counting office was asking for this. But he’s done it, folks; he’s managed to make a big dumb watchable action movie!