"Silverado" is a gorgeous looking Western. The costume and set design along with the locations give the film an authentic vibe, Lawrence Kasdan's Western very much looks the part. However, its script and fairly benign characters that makes this film a tedious chore to sit through.

"Silverado" is a typical Western set up. Four strangers (two being brothers) band together to take down a corrupt sheriff and his posse of thugs that are harassing the townspeople of Silverado. It's very familiar ground and it does nothing inventive, and the story plays out pretty how you'd imagine from the start.

With a stellar cast featuring Kevin Kline, Scott Glenn, Kevin Costner, Danny Glover (who's the standout by far) I hoped that…

"This oughta do," - Mal.

- Autumn Rewatch 2018: boxd.it/1YsN6
Challenge 19: Rewatch a Western from Cowboys & Indians Top 100 list.
(15 of 20 Challenges Completed)

I haven't watched this film in at least 20 years. Thanks rewatch challenge!

Silverado is the story of four very different, but very skilled men, who cross paths on the way to the town of Silverado. Once they arrive, they each find their own motivations to fix the city they once loved, and it may have to get violent along the way. I really love this movie and would suggest it to any fans of the genre.

What I enjoy about Silverado is that it is an ultra-traditional western in story but possesses a…

Don’t mind me. I just needed to watch something to remind myself why I used to value the name Lawrence Kasdan before exposing myself to the nigh unbearable The Big Chill. 

Now I remember. 

But this also provides a chance to heap some much-deserved praise on the great Danny Glover. 

Everybody in this talented ensemble delivers on what’s expected of them. Both Scott Glenn and Kevin Costner seem like they could’ve fallen right off the pages of a Louis L’Amour novel. Even Kevin Kline managed to remove the stick that usually seems permanently lodged up his backside. But on this viewing, I was really taken with everything Glover was doing. 

He just has this innate ability to fit right into…

With a who's who of recognizable faces, this is an imminently watchable western if only as a pinnacle specimen of where the genre was in the 80s, which was a woeful state of disarray. Eastwood had Pale Rider the same year, but what else did the 80s have to offer? Lone Riders is underrated. What else? Young Guns? No thank you. Silverado is clearly going for an old-fashioned romanticizing of the genre but it still falls into some unflattering 80s trappings. It's way too long, squeezing in so many gun fights that I became numb to them. There's a bombastic overuse of musical score that's reminiscent of 80s Spielberg and 80s Zemeckis that adds a heavy burden of cheese to…

La celebración del wéstern en su hora más oscura. Un recorrido con hálito aventurero por la iconografía y las constantes del género que casi no dejó nada sin recrear: los indios y el ferrocarril se quedaron fuera en última instancia, pero es imposible echar de menos ningún otro elemento (o a ningún actor de la época, ciertamente).

Silverado cabalga alegre guiada por un score exultante y por cuatro westerners de una pieza haciendo converger sus respectivos arcos –puro paradigma del Oeste todos ellos– hasta ese lugar-compendio en el que se desarrolla un tercer acto que es una fiesta.
No hallarás profundidad psicológica en los personajes del film de Kasdan, porque su función es otra: la de canalizar toda una mitología. Tan importante…

A group of men randomly meet as they make their way to the town of Silverado. The group starts with Scott Glenn (who we meet during a shootout as a group of men try to ambush him in a small shack), and then adds Kevin Kline, who Glenn encounters in the desert in his underwear after Kline has had all of his belongings stolen by a group of bastards. Then they meet Danny Glover, who befriends them after they balk at the casual racism of a bartender. Lastly, they add Kevin Costner to the group. Costner, perhaps more lively and energetic than I've ever seen him, plays Glenn's younger brother who is set to be hung when we meet him.…

Well, it ain't exactly The Wild Bunch. Just know that going in. This is about as far from the revisionist westerns of the 70's or the Italian fever dreams of the 60's as possible. It's the sort of thing that even predates the dark, psychologically complex character driven westerns of the 50's. This is a west that never really existed, except in dime novels and old B-movies. The heroes are good bad men; killers with an incorruptible sense of justice who always do the right thing, even when the law's against them. Everybody's a crack shot--except when it would be inconvenient for the bad guys to shoot straight. There's never much doubt as to how the conflict will resolve itself,…

An old favourite – which I can’t recall seeing in the cinema – but which was a TV mainstay for me in the late ‘80s and ‘90s. It’s almost a prototypical Western, as if Kasdan threw every Western cliché from the beginning of that century into a blender. EXCEPT, of course the darker, revisionist, often bitter Westerns that skulked out of Hollywood in the late 1960s and 1970s. Those cynical (and often brilliant) Westerns basically killed the standard Western of Hollywood’s Golden Years – those earnest, clear-cut, White hat vs Black hat mythic fables. Silverado thus seems a reaction AGAINST the cynicism, and an attempt to return the Western to that lighter, earnest vibe. That might make it a bit…

Western number two was much more successful! I found Silverado to be fun and entertaining. My brain kept trying to make me view this as a comedy, though, and I think that may have had some sort of impact. I associate Kevin Kline and John Cleese with humorous roles, so that’s probably the explanation. 

Released in 1985, Silverado is very much a movie of the 80’s. Coming off of The Good, The Bad, and the The Ugly where I only knew Clint Eastwood, I felt I knew the whole cast of Silverado. Even playing a crooked sheriff, I was reminded that I have a soft-spot for Brian Dennehy. Jeff Fahey’s eyes should have won an award for playing the deputy-with-anger-issues,…