"Silverado" - An Honest, First-Person Film Review

Photo credit: Amazon, Fair Use

“Silverado” could have and should have been a better film that it turned out to be. Yet it is credited for reviving the western as a profitable film genre. To be fair, before I watched this movie, I had never been a fan of westerns, but I did not find this movie to be all that bad. It was somewhat of a time-waster, but considering the kind of “fun” movie that it supposedly is, that would’ve been the point of the movie anyway.


“Silverado” is an escape to a lawless Wild West. For me, though, it lacked any true sense of adventure, any real danger, or any desire to ever visit Silverado. Mostly, I found it to be a waste of a lot of big name actors – although, to be fair, some of them were not the big names that they would later become.

It was a valiant attempt to bring back the western, and I’m pretty sure that this movie did so. I found most of the acting to be adequate. While some people found Kevin Costner “annoying,” I believe that he was well into the spirit of the character. This was also Costner’s first leading role, in a long line of many. I must agree with those who say that he is a bright spot in the movie, because he is. Jake was supposed to be a wild character, a kid who has two guns, shooting everything in sight simply because he can.

There are no consequences. Welcome to the Wild West.

“Silverado’s” entertainment value was decent. There were times that I felt good whenever the heroes did something good, but it certainly was not what I’d consider as a good movie. I think that the shootouts were no doubt the best part of the film. Most everything else was fairly cheesy.

I found Slick to be a very annoying and pretty much pointless character, other than being an archetype of a classic Western character, the “self-made man who tripped over a gold mine.” I didn’t find very much of the film to be overly funny, though Jake swinging from the rafters I found to be somewhat amusing.

I wouldn’t kick lots of dirt on this film as many others have, but I certainly am not a big fan of this film. It was a “fun” brainless sort of movie, in my opinion. If that’s what it really was meant to be, then the producers did their job and made their money. It allowed westerns to regain some of their former popularity, too, so it was good for that.

I do think that some great talent was wasted here, however. This film could’ve been much better, and I’ll bet a lot of good stuff was left out during the editing process. There is no wonderful art in this edit.

I will not go as far as to call this film “awful.” It certainly has many parts that drag it down, the most obvious of which was the ending. Cobb’s death seemed far too simple. The plot has so many random elements and people almost literally come out of nowhere. Then, they build up this climax to end the story with a very predictable ending: Paden kills Sheriff Cobb and becomes the new sheriff of Silverado. This could’ve been a far better movie than what became the final product. As it turns out, much of this film was left on the cutting room floor, especially the scenes with Hannah.

Perhaps Hannah was the greatest victim of what amounts to some poor choices in editing. In the final film, she seemed to be just an extra character, not all that relevant to the story. Yet, she has one of the more interesting lines. It just happens to be in a scene that seems ridiculously out of place with the rest of the story. It is as if they put the plot of Silverado on hold and decided to insert a “love interest” scene, then get back to the plot and forget that it even happened.

In that scene, Hannah is with Paden. Hannah comments on how men find her so beautiful, and how she doesn’t really care about that. She tells Paden that she came out West to build something that would last on this land, and hoped to have a prospering farm one day. She knew her physical beauty wouldn’t last forever and that it was ridiculous to dwell on it. So, she much preferred building something that would last beyond her own years, something that she could be proud of. This is an interesting idea, but it is just simply forgotten in the rest of the film. Perhaps, some explanations lie on the cutting room floor for why this movie wasn’t better than it was.

---