Silverado (1985)
Directed by Lawrence Kasdan
Four unwitting heroes cross paths on their journey to the sleepy town of Silverado. Little do they know the town where their family and friends reside has been taken over by a corrupt sheriff and a murderous posse. It's up to the sharp-shooting foursome to save the day, but first they have to break each other out of jail, and learn who their real friends are.
5 connections found
View:
5 connections, in both directions
What critics compared Silverado to
Pratt would be wonderful as Jake in Silverado or Crash in Bull Durham (if it weren't so naughty), or a gill-man throwing a little girl into the ocean, or even as a clueless Civil War soldier discovering Native Americans for the first time.
Though a remake of the Sturges film (which itself was an adaptation of Akira Kurosawa’s 1954 film “Seven Samurai”), “The Magnificent Seven” also bears some similarities to Lawrence Kasdan’s “Silverado,” the early 1980s western that also used a multi-ethnic cast to explore the old west.
Nobody remembers this now, but back then, the trades were counting on reunited Silverado collaborators Lawrence Kasdan and Kevin Costner to deliver the sleeper hit of the summer; although back then everybody peripheral to the production tried to pawn the film's failure off on the growing cult of Tombstone worship, the fact is that Wyatt Earp is, if not the most tedious movie ever made, perhaps the second-most.
This 2003 nonstarter is made all the worse for our knowing that it not only came originally from the pen of America's most popular and prolific horror-story writer but that it was directed by one of Hollywood's premier filmmakers, Lawrence Kasdan ("Body Heat," "The Big Chill," "Silverado," "Grand Canyon," "The Accidental Tourist"), and the script co-written by one of the screen's best writers, William Goldman ("Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid," "The Stepford Wives," "All the President's Men," "Marathon Man," "The Princess Bride," "Misery").
Not helping is dialogue comprised of the sort of shorthand catch-phrase idioglossia meant to imply years of familiarity but only succeeding in making one pine for the days when Kasdan was penning (he shares a screenwriting credit here with Goldman) strong, character-driven genre pieces (The Empire Strikes Back, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Body Heat, Silverado) without narrative crutches and meandering shortcuts.
Advertisement
Costner, who was probably more alive as the corpse in "The Big Chill" than he is here, learned about the script when he and Kasdan were making "Silverado," and for whatever reason decided not just to produce it with Kasdan and Jim Wilson, but to play a role that was originally intended for Steve McQueen.