Sunday 21 July 2024

Maverick (1994 Richard Donner)

I was looking for something fun and distracting for a Sunday afternoon, but I couldn't find The Sorrow and the Pity, so this had to do. William Goldman continually subverts expectation - for example, the scene in which Mel Gibson seems to chicken out to gunslinger (Max Perlich) he realises he's playing poker with - but then turns out to be a much better shot. And this sort of thing goes right on up until the very ending, so it's a lot of fun. Perhaps drags a bit with stuff about Indian Graham Greene (The Green Mile, Dances with Wolves), but its general playfulness evokes The Princess Bride.

The Monument Valley sequence does indeed pay homage to that amazing piece of stunt horsework from Stagecoach.

Jodie Foster, James Garner, Alfred Molina, James Coburn, Geoffrey Lewis. Cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond is also in it! (as Albert Bierstadt). Edited by Stuart Baird and Michael Kelly.





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