Their notoriety and the professionalism of the Pinkerton Detective Agency has made it difficult for them to continue their state-side activities. Butch criticizes E. H. Harriman's expensive efforts to eliminate their menace once and for all:

That's bad business. How long do you think I would be in operation if every time I pulled a job, it cost me money? Just pay me what he's spending to make me stop robbin' him, I'd stop robbin' him. (Screaming out the door at E. H. Harriman) You probably inherited every penny you got!

They decide to high-tail it to South America (Bolivia), believing it will be easy living there. Etta decides to go there with them with one caveat:

I'm twenty-six, and I'm single and a schoolteacher and that's the bottom of the pit. And the only excitement I've known is here with me now. So I'll go with you and I won't whine. And I'll sew your socks and I'll stitch you when you're wounded, and I'll do anything you ask of me, except one thing: I won't watch you die. I'll miss that scene if you don't mind.

Dressed up and ready to leave Etta's place, Butch pushes the bicycle away, sending it crashing into a puddle. He spitefully exclaims: "Future's all yours, you lousy bicycles."

A second sepia-toned segment of the film depicts the New York sojourn of the three fugitives with an end-of-an-era feel. With over three hundred stills-tintype photos and period music, a romanticized, stylized, and nostalgic glimpse is given of turn-of-the-century life in an imaginative montage. They book steamship passage to South America from New York. The film returns to color as they step off a Bolivian train in a country village in the middle of a god-forsaken landscape. Butch and Sundance exchange cynical, caustically-humorous banter about their predicament:

Butch: Well, you know, it could be worse. You get a lot more for your money in Bolivia, I checked on it.
Sundance: What could they have here that you could possibly want to buy?
Butch: All Bolivia can't look like this.
Sundance: (infuriated) How do you know? This might be the garden spot of the whole country. People may travel hundreds of miles just to get to this spot where we're standing now. This might be the Atlantic City, New Jersey of all Bolivia, for all you know.
Butch assures Etta that Sundance will feel better after returning to their old profession:
He'll feel a lot better after he's robbed a couple of banks.
But their first Bolivian bank hold-up is thwarted because they are ignorant of Spanish instructions such as: "This is a robbery!" "Raise your hands!" "All of you back against the wall!" "Give me the money!" and "Where is the safe? Open it!" Because their "line of work requires a specialized vocabulary," Etta teaches them phonetic Spanish for the useful phrases. Their next attempted bank robbery is clumsily executed - Butch shouts out the wrong lines and checks out his "cribsheet" while Sundance becomes exasperated with him during the bungled theft: "They're against the wall already!" After they escape with the money, Butch beams: "Well we're back in business boys and girls, just like the old days." After several successful heists, their outlaw reputation revives their status as hunted criminals, and wanted posters appear for the arrest of the marked men. Again, life becomes dangerous when their reputation spreads from town to town.

Butch and Sundance attempt to reform and go "straight," serving as payroll guards for a mining company. They are employed by Percy Garris (Strother Martin), an old prospector who can't spit straight into the dust, to protect the transport of gold shipments:

"You see, every mine around gets its payroll from La Paz. Every mine around gets its payroll held up. Some say it's the Bolivian bandits and some say that it's the banditos Yanquis."
Paranoid about ambushing bandits behind every tree and bush on their first trip, Garris cautions his new hires:
Garris: Will you two beginners cut it out?
Butch: Well, we're just tryin' to spot an ambush, Mr. Garris.
Garris: Morons! I've got morons on my team. Nobody is going to rob us going down the mountain. We have got no money going DOWN the mountain. When we have got the money on the way back, then you can sweat.
On the trip back after collecting the payroll from a bank that Butch and Sundance hit in June, Garris tells them to relax:
You've gotta get used to Bolivian ways. You got to go easy...(patooiee!!!! Damn it!)...like I do. Course you probably think I'm crazy, but I'm not. (patooiee!!!! Bingo!) I'm colorful. That's what happens when you live ten years alone in Bolivia - you get colorful.
Garris is shot to death by Bolivian peasant bandits before he finishes his sentence. Legitimately hired to protect the money that isn't theirs, Butch and Sundance survive the shoot-out, but it is the first time in his life that Butch is forced to kill.
Sundance: Can you take the two on the right?
Butch: Kid, there's somethin' I think I oughta tell ya. I never shot anybody before.
Sundance: One hell of a time to tell me.
After the gun battle in which the bandits reel backwards in slow-motion (reminiscent of the finale in Bonnie and Clyde (1967)), Sundance tells Butch that their efforts to go straight have failed, and that the job proves more violent than robbing banks: "Well we've gone straight. What do we try now?" Etta suggests other straight professions without killing: "There are other ways of going straight. There's farming. You could buy a place...What about a ranch then?" She decides to return to the U.S. because she fears that they will be killed and she doesn't want to see them die.

With Etta gone, the two offbeat outlaws resort to their old ways. In a small Bolivian village while they eat on an open patio (Butch describes the food: "specialty of the house and it's still moving"), they are recognized and the Bolivian constabulary is alerted. Bullets strike their table and they scramble for cover. To go for more ammunition, Sundance gives Butch cover, but the fearsome gunfire wounds both of them. While cornered in an empty stucco building, the two wounded men still bicker with each other, giving a mocking, ironic edge to their words:

Butch: Is that what you call giving cover?
Sundance: Is that what you call running? If I knew you were gonna stroll...
Butch: You never could shoot, not from the very beginning.
Sundance: And you were all mouth.
They are unaware that a whole regiment of hundreds of Bolivian soldiers arrives to surround them - the "banditos Yanquis." While bleeding badly, they daydream and optimistically talk of new places to go, even debating about the possibility of emigrating to Australia and starting a new life there:
Butch: I got a great idea where we should go next.
Sundance: I don't want to hear it.
Butch: You'll change your mind when I tell ya.
Sundance: Shut up.
Butch: OK, OK.
Sundance: It's your great ideas that got us here.
Butch: Forget about it.
Sundance: I don't ever want to hear another one of your ideas. All right?
Butch: All right.
Sundance: OK.
Butch: Australia - I figured secretly you wanted to know, so I told ya. Australia.
Sundance: That's your great idea?
Butch: Oh, the greatest in a long line.
Sundance: Australia's no better than here.
Butch: That's all you know.
Sundance: Name me one thing better.
Butch: They speak English in Australia.
Sundance: They do?
Butch: That's right, smart guy, so we wouldn't be foreigners. They got horses in Australia. And they got thousands of mountains you hide out in. And good climate. Nice beaches. You could learn to swim.
Sundance: No swimming! It isn't important. What about the banks?
Butch: They're easy. Easy, ripe, and luscious.
Sundance: The banks or the women?
Butch: Once you've got one, you've got the other.
Sundance: It's a long way, isn't it?
Butch: Ah, everything's got to be perfect with you.
Sundance: I just don't want to get there and find out it stinks - that's all.
Butch: At least think about it.
Sundance: All right, I'll think about it.
The two are unable to comprehend the reality of their doomed situation that awaits them outside. Escape is impossible. After they have loaded their guns and positioned guns in their hands, they ready themselves for a dash toward the horses:
Butch: When we get outside, when we get to the horses, just remember one thing. Hey, wait a minute!
Sundance: What?
Butch: You didn't see Lefors out there, did ya?
Sundance: Lefors? No.
Butch: (confidently) Good. For a moment there, I thought we were in trouble.
They emerge with guns blazing from their hiding place for their last shootout against impossible odds in the courtyard. Rather than ending the film in bullet-ridden deaths, the picture ends with the well-known freeze-frame of their final charge, drowned out by the sounds of thousands of guns firing on them from all angles. The image freezes, blurs, and then keeps a sepia-toned focus on the legendary, eternal bravura image of the two compadres in their final moments as they meet their fate together. [The third sepia-toned segment of the film captures their images as legendary, carefree characters, making good guys out of bad guys.]

Created in 1996, by Tim Dirks.
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