Summer of ‘94: Maverick

Richard Donner’s Western comedy holds up incredibly well.

It might seem hard to believe now that he’s best known for his drunken, misogynistic and racist outbursts, but 30 years ago there were few stars more likable than Mel Gibson. Even though he burst into stardom on a wave of revenge pictures and action flicks, few actors embodied as much playfulness. Watch Lethal Weapon again (and Franchise Friday will get there one day) and you’ll see a performance just as indebted to the Three Stooges as Dirty Harry. 

I don’t know that Gibson’s charisma has been more effectively weaponized than in Maverick, Richard Donner’s adaptation of the James Garner-led Western TV series. This is a movie replete with crazy stunts and big stars, yet its biggest asset is Gibson’s charm, which gives the movie a lighthearted effervescence often lacking from self-serious studio tentpoles. 

When we first meet Bret Maverick, he’s in the middle of “a shitty week.” A group of outlaws – led by Alfred Molina’s Angel – have captured Maverick, tied a noose around his neck and left him on his horse, with an angry rattlesnake nearby to finish the job. As Maverick tries to find his way out of his latest pickle, the movie flashes back to his very bad week, in which he came to town to collect some money to build a $25,000 buy-in for a poker tournament. He quickly finds that everyone who should have his money suddenly has excuses, gets on the bad side of Angel and his gang during a poker match, and crosses paths with Annabelle Bransford (Jodie Foster), a spunky Southern Belle with her own secrets. 

It’s easy to watch Maverick today and think “they don’t make them like they used to.” But even in 1994, the movie felt like an oddity, definitely not the type of movie you’d expect to rake in $183 million worldwide. Westerns weren’t exactly lighting up the box office; you had Dances with Wolves, Unforgiven and a few others, both those were all commentaries on the genre. In his review, Roger Ebert praised the movie for being a Western simply for its own enjoyment, saying “It acts like it’s the most natural thing in the world to be a Western.” 

I saw Maverick in theaters – it was a rainy Saturday matinee at a second-run theater with my dad and siblings – and I remember enjoying it enough that I watched it multiple times once it hit home video. I was never – and still am not – a major Western fan, but I enjoyed the movie’s lightness, the constant plot reversals and double-crosses, and the joy of having a lead actor so willing to subvert the strong, silent type. 

Thirty years later, Maverick holds up remarkably well, and made a fascinating if inadvertent pairing with The Fall Guy last week. Both are adaptations of long-forgotten television series, both have charismatic leading men willing to poke fun at their heroic images, and both are completely fun larks that I could recommend to anyone looking for a breezy way to kill two hours. 

Maverick is, as Ebert said, unabashedly a Western, although it does its own recontextualizing throughout – particularly when it comes to casting Graham Greene as a Native American eager to cash-in on white folks’ desire to exploit stereotypes. Gibson’s Lethal Weapon director Richard Donner seems eager to direct a Western not so he can reinvent it so much as revel in its tropes. There are saloon brawls, card games, runaway stagecoaches and quick-draw shootouts; the only thing missing is a train robbery (but a poker game aboard a steamboat suffices). In an age of big-budget genre intent on crafting mythology and setting up franchises, it’s refreshing to revisit something that feels both big and like so much of a lark. 

There’s a story to Maverick, but it’s largely a series of episodic incidents and reversals that play out as a constantly-building joke. Bret wants to collect on his debts to enter into the poker tournament. Everyone who owes him money has an excuse as to why they don’t have it; usually, they’re conning him. The film is a series of misadventures and reveals. Maverick’s attempts to avoid fights often lead to more trouble. Even when he does set out to be the hero – such as repairing a stagecoach wheel while it’s in motion – he’s the butt of the joke. 

It’s a light, very fun performance from Gibson, an actor who could play clumsy and afraid just as well as rage-filled and tortured. Bret doesn’t want to be a hero and doesn’t want to start trouble – he often projects a timid streak as a cover butt reveals himself to be deft at the card table, quick on the draw and possessing a pesky conscience. An early sequence in which he promises to lose at poker for an hour as an excuse to understand his competitors’ tells is funny and gives Gibson a chance to goof around. There are a few sequences where Maverick is angered and the rage that was played for comedy 30 years ago feels a bit more uncomfortable with what we know about Gibson today, but otherwise it’s a pure movie star performance.

Maverick is a conman, but it’s not presented as a character flaw because everyone in this movie is a con artist. Gibson’s willingness to play silly gives the ensemble permission to lean into the humor so that the film’s constant reveals don’t become grating but rather unfold as jokes. Foster has rarely been this fun. The normally very serious actress plays the clumsy and conniving Annabelle with a lot of joy and has a fantastic spark with Gibson; I wish she’d do more comedy. Garner waltzes in as a straight-laced law official, and has a great time playing a deadpan killjoy who has his own agendas (the final scene is a great last-minute twist). And the film is filled with great supporting performances and cameos – Molina is a fantastic growling villain; James Coburn is the regal, slightly sinister Commodore who plans the entire poker tournament; and a bevvy of country music stars and Western icons show up in cameos. As I said earlier, Greene gets a great stretch as a Native American eager to exploit white stupidity and greed. There’s even an appearance by Danny Glover, who shares brief screen time with Gibson and gets to mutter his iconic “I’m getting too old for this shit.”  

Donner’s direction is nimble; the film aims less to be a dazzling spectacle and more to be a fun tour through Western tropes. He makes the poker easy to follow and suspense-filled, and the romance airy and light. Revisiting these older films, I’m often reminded how much we lose when filmmakers stop working in real locations and with physical stunts; Maverick’s stunt sequences are a tactile and energetic, and the Western locales look amazing. William Goldman’s script is breezy, filled with some great banter and constantly revealing new alliances, motives and wrinkles. The film might move a bit better were it trimmed a tad – at over two hours, the pacing sometimes suffers – but I was impressed how much fun I had revisiting this one. 

There are two reasons I do these revisits each summer. One is to finally catch up with beloved films that may have slipped under my radar in my youth. The other is to see how the films I enjoyed as a teenager have held up. Sometimes, that’s a dangerous gamble. Other times, as with Maverick, I’m thrilled to see that it’s just as fun today as it was when I was 14. This one’s aces.