Review of Wagons East

Released around the same time as The Cowboy Way, Lightning Jack, and City Slickers II: The Legend of Curly's Gold, Wagons East! was another attempt to recapture City Slickers success to diminishing returns. The film follows a group of misfits including tightly wound bank manager Ben(Star Trek Voyagaer's Robert Picardo), effeminate and very heavily implied to be homosexual bookshop owner Julian(played thanklessly by John C. McGinley), and former doctor turned flailing cattle rancher Phil(played by Richard Lewis at his most Richard Lewis) who are all sick of life in the west and hire alcoholic wagonmaster James Harlowe(John Candy in his final role) to bring them back to St. Louis. The movie's setup is nowhere near strong enough to sustain this 107 minute movie as most of it can be boiled down to "the West sucks" which serves as the crux for the humor in the films strongest point in the first 10 minutes, afterwards however the movie doesn't really do much with its core premise other than periodically reminding us of it as the catalyst for the film. Sprinkled throughout the journey are Wile. E. Coyote esque gags involving a hired gun named John Slade(complete with backfiring traps), Indians with names like Big Snake that makes women faint, and lowest common denominator gags galore including a piss drinking scene. There's nothing wrong with these gags IF they're done well, but the movie's pacing is so slow and poorly paced that there's no surprise factor to the gags and everyone feels overly telegraphed and lacking in punch. The fact that they had to restructure the movie around Candy's death must've been no small task for the crew to deliver a finished project and it definitely explains why Candy disappears for long sections of the movie with focus shifting to Lewis and Picardo with some rather telling ADR conversations between them over wagon B-roll footage used to link scenes together. I can say that Wagons East is in fact a movie, but it's not a good one.