City Slickers (1991)

I love this movie so much

Absolutely Fantastic

The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

It's a good bad... and worth a popcorn matinée. While it's easy to lament what could have been...

I loved this thing as a kid. Loved it. Even the sequel. But that was the young me, the teenage me, the still stuck in the 80s me, the me who'd rent a movie every single day on VHS and watch any old 80s crap, whether it involved Steve Guttenberg, Bobcat Goldthwait, Eddie Murphy, or Billy Crystal.Oh dear, has this movie aged badly. And how about Billy Crystal? He is still doing an incredibly bad impression of Woody Allen, just as he did in 'When Harry Met Sally'. But he's not funny when he whines, just incredibly annoying, not to mention dishonest. I am not buying his whining the way I buy Allen's. That was the first thing that struck me as watched this film again, more than 20 years after the first time I saw it. There is nothing really funny in this film. The ice cream fatso? The irritating high-energy sidekick? The insecure, slightly dumb, introverted sidekick? Oh, what a motley crew it is, conflicts between these personalities is guaranteed to result in funny scenes, right? Fat chance.See, the best thing about this movie has always been that gritty old cowboy, and that's the only redeeming feature of this film. Take that away and you have a film that makes you want to commit suicide. That's how boring, predictable, and outright irritating it is. And just how easily manipulated were we to enjoy that cheap crap about a little calf? Please. Oh, one more thing: Is Crystal meant to learn something during this film? I certainly didn't. And neither did he, but let's pretend we all did. Audiences back then certainly didn't care about anything - not that we are any better today, mind you. We are so cynical that we don't even pretend to care about love and the meaning of life.I'm giving this film one star. I do not like it in any way.

Aside from Blazing Saddles, City Slickers stands as the best comedy western made in the last 25 years. An excellent film starring Billy Crystal, Daniel Stern, Bruno Kirby and the iconic Jack Palance (in his Oscar winning role).The story was deeper than just comedy, and the dialogue was really great. The story itself had a lot of heart, each main character was dealing with something different than the other. And the dialogue between the cast was more natural than one would expect from comedy.If you enjoy comedy and/or westerns, watch this film, you'll be glad you did. You'll be hooked from the beginning and you'll hang on to every scene.

City Slickers is a good movie with a well written storyline and an impressive comedic cast. It has many very funny parts and it is also quite sweet as we follow the friendship of these three men, their is great chemistry between all three and you could tell they were real life friends. It easily could have been an outstanding, unforgettable comedy, which many people think it is, and though I did laugh a lot, I find it pretty forgettable and none of the quotes will stick with me. I definitely don't think Jack Palance deserved the Academy Award for Best Actor in a Supporting Role, he did a great job and Curly is a very likable character, but it simply isn't a performance, nor is it a movie, strong enough for an award of this prestige. It's certainly not outstanding or unforgettable, but City Slickers is fun while it lasts and I would recommend it to anyone looking for a comedy to kill some time. A man unhappy with his life is talked in to going on a cattle drive with his two closest friends. Best Performance: Billy Crystal Worst Performance: Patricia Wettig

Few other comedic filmmakers understand the west on a comedic, farcical level than Ron Underwood. Just a year before directing City Slickers, Underwood directed one of my favorite contemporary comedy/horror films, Tremors, about a small, rather unpopulated town in Nevada being literally swallowed by mutant, underground worms. The film was not just fun to watch, but fun to imagine that deep underground there are large, unearthly worms that have remained undetected by elaborate seismographs and are now resurfacing to swallow anything that could cause a detectable vibration underground. Needless to say, after watching it when I was eight, I took extra-quiet steps.And here's City Slickers, a comedy that uses the wild west as a background for numerous visual gags, snappy wordplay, and a trio of great performances. The three guys are Mitch Robbins (Billy Crystal), a radio advertiser who is experiencing his midlife crisis after turning thirty-nine, Phil Berquist (Daniel Stern), who is stuck in a sexless marriage in the midst of managing a grocery store, and Ed Furillo (Bruno Kirby), a womanizer uncomfortable with the notion that there is a time to "settle down." On his birthday, Mitch is given a present from his two buds which is a vacation down on a southern cattle drive. Reluctantly, he accepts, and before they know it, they are defending the cattle drive in true western fashion.Billy Crystal is an ideal character for Mitch. He has the right balance of comedic wit and dramatic potency to make a character like this work well on the basis of being a sadsack but also a compelling lead. Stern and Kirby work well in the supporting characters, mainly because they themselves have good comedic timing and work well off of Crystal's lead.City Slickers works better than another western farce by the name of Three Amigos, which was stunningly mediocre in its inclusion of three hilarious comedians - Steve Martin, Chevy Chase, and Martin Short - and successfully finding nothing interesting to do with them. The film drifted from one stale setup to another, falling flat on its face, before stumbling over to the next contrived setup and doing the same. Too many instances in the film were dry and the laugh to actor ration was surprisingly very low.City Slickers works because writers Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandel know how to effectively utilize their talent and give each character sustainable depth and energy to run for the near-two hour runtime the film holds. In that time, the film is often funny, kind of poignant, a little overlong, but heartfelt all the more. It's some kind of minor miracle this was well-received by a general public.Starring: Billy Crystal, Daniel Stern, and Bruno Kirby. Directed by: Ron Underwood.