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City Slickers (1991)


City Slickers (1991)



6/10



Starring
Billy Crystal
Bruno Kirby
Daniel Stern
Patricia Wettig
Helen Slater
Jack Palance


Directed by Ron Underwood

The fun in the movie is when Billy Crystal starts making jokes, and not in the over 1 hour 50 minutes spent watching him do it. City Slickers was good to watch, but to me the movie is a little overhyped. After you see a movie done in the 90s you expect it to be great, but this one is just there.

The movie is about three men in their late 30s realizing that life has more to offer than what they are stuck with. What led to that and how they discover it is what writers Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandel put together for us to watch. Both writers have been at it for a while, with movies like Multiplicity (1996) and Robots (2005) under their belt.

City Slickers did nab an Academy Award though. Jack Palance went home with Best Actor in a Supporting Role and also won the Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actor.

The movie plot has three men who decide to go on a trip and be cowboys for two weeks, which involves herding a group of cattle.

In their journey they experience death, birth and near-death.

City Slickers is seen as a form of a classic, but the movie to me is missing the key ingredient for a classic. Although it happens to be one, it got a 90% approval rating on the review aggregate site Rotten Tomatoes and can be found on the AFI's 100 Years... 100 Laughs at number 86.

Ron Underwood (Mighty Joe Young 1998) was the man behind the wheel in this one, a wheel I believe he held too loosely. The movie dragged for almost 2 hours, most of which were wasted watching the characters discussing pointlessly.

The movie had a $26 million budget and was a commercial success, making over $179 million at the box office. Due to that financial success, Billy Crystal (who produced this movie) produced a sequel that was released three years later. The sequel was a flop. Although some of the old cast returned, it currently holds a 19% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes. It was also a commercial failure, as it cost 10 million more than the first and only managed to make a little over $43 million.

Did I enjoy City Slickers? Yes. Will I like to see it again? No!

This is one of those movies I feel everyone has to see once.

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