Silverado (1985)

Waste of time

Best movie ever!

Blistering performances.

One of the film's great tricks is that, for a time, you think it will go down a rabbit hole of unrealistic glorification.

This is the type of western that you can rewatch several times and find something new --not only is the cast of the chart, but the acting, the dialogue, the humor, the good writing makes it an outstanding movie.

I really enjoyed this movie. I didn't really know what it was about and glad I ended up watching it. I can see rewatching this in the future. It had everything a good Western should. Kind of reminded me a little of Tombstone but more fun, even the bad guy seemed somewhat likeable.

The Western genre seemed dead, but then Lawrence Kasden and his brother, Mark, came up with this homage to the traditional, grand stories they probably watched together on Saturday afternoons when they were kids.Here are all the clichés, but done with panache and a sprinkle of humor. You have an opening gunfight, the stranger rescued after robbers left him to die. You've got frontier towns rising no more than a couple of ramshackle stories from the arid, rocky expanse of New Mexico (where the entire picture was filmed).There are stampeding cattle, saloons filled with hard-drinking trail-riders, cowboys jumping on their horses from roofs (cowboys who know and love their horses more than their women), a couple of love interests that waste the talents of some decent actresses (but a strong performance by Linda Hunt as the "Miss Kitty"-type character, Stella, who runs the local saloon), and you've got several deliciously quirky villains played by the likes of Brian Dennehy, Jeff Goldblum, James Gammon and Jeff Fahey. You have all of these bad guys doing things to other people that they shouldn't oughta do, from shooting an old man to kidnapping a little boy to threatening women. And you have big gun battles as the team of four unlikely heroes rescue the hostages with clever ploys that make up for the fact that the heroes are always outnumbered by the villains' henchmen.You have the final, high-stakes showdown between the chief hero and chief villain that is dramatically promised from the first twenty minutes of this rather long movie, following which, all is put right so that the four heroes can go off in different directions to meet their destinies (except that one always stays because now he belongs to the town he saved). And it is fortunate that of the two towns mentioned in the script, Turley (a relatively civilized town controlled by an only mildly corrupt sheriff - an Englishman played by John Cleese who admits he is "not from these parts") and Silverado (a wild town controlled by an extremely corrupt sheriff), the movie was not named for "Turley". Wouldn't have been as romantic a title.

I sometimes jokingly tell people this is the greatest Western I have ever watched. Then I wonder if I really am joking.From the opening scene where the buddies meet up to the introduction of the baddies and their actions. All seems plausible due to very good direction and writing. Yes there are clichés, but in a good way.If you like Westerns of any sort you will enjoy this movie.And now, a word about review length requirements. I added that longer middle section to fulfill the length requirement. I don't really think it adds to the review and I think shorter reviews should be allowed. After all, this last sentence would not be necessary at all.