City Slickers

A comedy that's cheery, earnest, harmless and almost totally lacking in bite. City Slickers ambles along lackadaisically, incorporating birth, death, casual wisecracks and a running gag about two ice-cream moguls who pride themselves on knowing the right flavor for any occasion. Each of these things seems to be given equal weight. Read full review

Crystal's self-pitying character starts out promisingly - an early highlight being his lecture on ageing to schoolchildren - but the constant rapid-fire quips become increasingly predictable. Read full review

The funny sequences and dumb jokes in City Slickers are so much more entertaining than the male-bonding blather that you wonder what the filmmakers had in mind. Did they think they would cheat audiences if they didn't also throw in the tears and the hugs? In comedy, the only cheat for audiences is not being funny. [7 June 1991, p.F-1]

In the old days -- when Hollywood knew how to make funny movies, and knew how to make cheap, sentimental potboilers, and knew the difference between the two -- City Slickers would have kept Laurel and Hardy busy for maybe 80 minutes. This version lasts nearly two hours, and the filler is all man-meets-cow, man-loses-cow. [7 June 1991, p.G-5]

The comic setup is smart, and the undertone of seriousness makes the first part of "City Slickers" genuinely amusing. But when the movie decides to get seriously serious it wears out its welcome fast. Did we really pay to see a male-sensitivity-training movie on horseback? [24 June 1991, p.60]

Crystal is funny in City Slickers but the film is flat and makes the desert feel as cramped and airless as a basement nightclub. [7 June 1991]