Each Monday, I continue to share Western movie reviews as I go through the process of finishing post and releasing my 12 Westerns in 12 Months during 2020. I am watching these films not from an audience perspective but as a filmmaker, as a student of the genre.
Week 106: The Ridiculous 6
Call me crazy or… ridiculous? But I really enjoyed this dumb Western comedy from the Sandler team. First off, there aren’t a lot of great Western Comedies out there. You can count the good ones on one hand. Second, this has more credibility than most of the “serious” Western made these days and actually has been action sequences than most of them as well.
Furthermore, it does something that recent Westerns like The Magnificent Seven fail to do: have a truly impressive cast. The faces just keep popping up here from Nolte to Keitel, comic heavy weights like Forte/Spade, and some great callbacks like Lovitz and Vanilla Ice (as Mark Twain!). I mean, come on, the entire film is worth watching just for John Turturro’s baseball scene which is written and played brilliantly.
Sure it’s stupid but it has some genuinely funny moments even if they are juvenile. Haven’t they always been in Sandler movies? A lot of people have told me that his Netflix era is not up to par with his classic films. I can’t really comment since I stopped watching (other than outliers like Punch Drunk Love and Uncut Gems) at Big Daddy. But this film makes me feel like his movies are still as stupid and amusing as they used to be.
And again, I may be ridiculous too but this is probably one of the better entries in the Western genre in the last 20 years. I’ll take it any day over that 3:10 to Yuma crap.
Watched on Netflix.
