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| Released: |
1994 |
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| Genre: |
WESTERN
COMEDY
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| Origin: |
US |
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| Colour: |
C |
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| Length: |
106 |
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Here, at last, is the anti-heroic answer to John Ford's Stagecoach, the first western to celebrate being a quitter. |
Reviewed by Chris Tookey
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| Matthew Carlson's screenplay starts from a simple, funny idea. Surely there must have been some western settlers who must have found the Wild West too wild, and tried to move back east to safety and civilisation? How would they have been regarded? Wagons East did not receive good reviews because (a) its characters are stereotypes (just like any number of other funny comedies), (b) it is self-consciously anachronistic and will therefore offend the purists, and (c) movies of this kind - from Destry Rides Again to Blazing Saddles - never do. However, John Candy was rarely funnier than he is here, in his last screen role as an incompetent wagonmaster; Richard Lewis is amusing as a displaced, urban family man, and John C. McGinley extracts every conceivable laugh from his less than butch bookseller. All the usual cliches and stereotypes are rounded up with affection. | | ANTI | | Woeful. | | | | (Variety) | | One of the least amusing comedies I've ever seen, right down there with "Clifford." Although it stars the allegedly hip Richard Lewis, its ‘humor’ consists largely of barnyard jokes, kicks in the crotch, hayseeds in love with their cows, jokes about gays and hookers, and a lot of shots where people fall over things, and things fall over them. Everything is punched up by cringe-inducing fiddle music; the score is one of those by-the-numbers jobs where every screen movement is accompanied by a musical note... The screenplay by Matthew Carlson and direction by Peter Markle are so amateurish I'm surprised they found backing from a major studio. The film has no sense of pacing, excitement, location or humor, and essentially reduces itself to shots of an ill-assorted group of characters awkwardly performing in contrived situations. No opportunity is missed for sticking in something that's supposed to be funny, but isn't - like the sleeping cap with a tassel, which Lewis wears at night. Many of the action sequences lead up to people falling over cliffs, after which we get a shot of them below, in the mud, and are supposed to laugh. I didn't. I also wasn't amused by a subplot involving hip Indians. | | | | (Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times) |
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, Richard Lewis 
