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The whole movie is like this, and you'll find your eyes rolling around in your head often. But to its credit, Thelma & Louise is wonderfully cast, particularly the two leads. The script is filled with witty, memorable dialogue and it only takes itself seriously when it has to. One of those moments occurs early in the film when Thelma and Louise set off on their impromptu vacation. They're headed to a friend's mountain cabin for a weekend of fun, fishing and girl talk. Thelma conspicuously packs a pistol into their luggage, all but turning to the camera and saying “This here's a gun. It's gonna be important later.”

Which turns out to be true. The girls stop off for a quick drink at a local honky tonk, and Thelma, against the advice of her friend, falls into the clutches of the town lech, Harlan Puckett (Timothy Carhart). Harlan plies Thelma with drinks, dance, and the kind of sparking banter that could only come out of the mouth of a married man. Next thing you know he has the poor girl in the parking lot, up against a car, ready to have his way with her. Up to now the movie has been a lark, but the brakes are quickly applied as Thelma realizes what's happening to her and attempts to stop it. Harlan beats her badly and is only thwarted when Louise appears and puts a bullet in his heart.

This here's a gun. It's gonna be important later.

The exact circumstances of the shooting are such that Louise feels uncomfortable going to the police. By her reckoning, people will assume that Thelma was “asking for it” after letting a clearly horny man buy her drinks and tell her jokes all night long. If this seems unnecessarily cynical, I can think of a real life case off the top of my head where a woman wound up dead in Central Park because there was no Louise on hand to save her – and the press made the rapist out to be the victim. Regardless of how prevalent you feel gender inequity remains in our society, you can't deny that these things DO happen.

Besides, if they 'd gone to the police, there'd be no movie!

The girls decide to go on the lam, and head for Mexico. This is where whatever logic was present in the film begins to break down, and you have to either accept it or not. What I mean is that Thelma & Louise begins to foreshadow its protagonists' eventual fate at a very early point in the story. And if you're familiar with the ending, you might assume that the whole script was written with that very conclusion in mind. Like a Greek tragedy or a Shakespearean drama, you can see it coming a mile away and every improbable plot contrivance seems tooled to facilitate it.

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