Entertainment
The 8 Most Fun Westerns of All Time, Ranked
Some of the greatest Westerns of all time aren’t particularly fun, or they’re engaging in ways that are a little different from “entertaining,” making it feel a bit strange to call them “fun.” So, the likes of Unforgiven, The Wild Bunch, Once Upon a Time in the West, and (obviously) The Great Silence will not be found below, even if they are some of the best Westerns ever made, and indeed better than some of the movies ranked here.
What matters here is that the Westerns are fun. These ones might well be good to watch if you’re not hugely fond of the genre, or if you are, then maybe they’ll prove extra entertaining. They can all count themselves among the most entertaining and broadly fun Western movies of all time, thanks to being action-packed, or funny, or particularly fast-paced, or maybe even all of the above.
8
‘Young Guns’ (1988)
As the title implies, the main characters of Young Guns are indeed young, but it’s not really a kid-friendly movie, nor particularly identifiable as a coming-of-age one. It’s about Billy the Kid and other outlaw members of the Regulators, but without much that’s historically accurate, though that’s okay. It’s not really that kind of movie, and the Old West is filled with stories of a more legendary variety, anyway.
It’s engaging and scarcely boring, containing a bunch of great actors and a fair amount of action for something that’s ultimately quite short, as far as feature-length films go. Young Guns is just all-around solid stuff, and it does what it needs to without worrying about going much further. It works, and that’s all that really matters, with the things that might be dated honestly feeling kind of charming, at least in some ways.
7
‘¡Three Amigos!’ (1986)
¡Three Amigos! is pretty much a comedic The Magnificent Seven, and The Magnificent Seven was pretty much a Western take on Seven Samurai. You do the math there (a kind of math, at least) and what you have is a comedic Western about people who are hired to defend a village from attackers, but the “warriors” here are actually just actors, and they don’t have the skills that traditional gunfighters have.
If that also sounds like A Bug’s Life, that’s because yes, A Bug’s Life builds on ¡Three Amigos!, which builds on The Magnificent Seven, which builds on Seven Samurai. There may be some other steps involved in that whole chain. Anyway, the main thing is that ¡Three Amigos! is a good deal of fun, and also one of the best Western comedies of all time (the absolute greatest came out a little over a decade earlier, though, and will be mentioned shortly).
6
‘Westworld’ (1973)
.jpg?q=49&fit=crop&w=825&dpr=2)
It’s easy to put Westworld here because, on one hand, it’s about people seeking fun, and there’s vicarious fun as a viewer in watching people do that. And then there’s a thrill in seeing things go wrong, because the source of “fun” here is a futuristic amusement park where visitors get to be immersed in an Old West kind of playground, but it’s also a sci-fi movie, and the technology malfunctions, because of course it does.
The Western feel of Westworld helps it stand out, and then it’s also entertaining because of how straight-to-the-point, well-paced, and punchy it is.
While that makes it sound very similar to Jurassic Park, Michael Crichton wrote both, so at worst, he was plagiarizing himself. But not really, because the Western feel of Westworld helps it stand out, and then it’s also entertaining because of how straight-to-the-point, well-paced, and punchy it is, doing quite a lot within a runtime that doesn’t exceed 90 minutes.
5
‘The Quick and the Dead’ (1995)
Sam Raimi made a Western. It’s The Quick and the Dead. It’s fun as a Western the same way his horror movies are fun (especially the sequels to The Evil Dead, which lean more into comedy) and his superhero movies are fun (hey, Spider-Man trilogy). There is something of a plot here, but it’s mostly concerned with assembling a bunch of colorful characters and having them take part in a quick-draw tournament.
It’s one of the more underrated Westerns of all time, too, getting overshadowed by those other Sam Raimi films, and also suffering a little popularity-wise, perhaps, from clearly being a cult classic. Still, why shouldn’t it be a more conventional classic, too? There’s a lot to like here, alongside all the offbeat and strange things (which you might also dig anyway), so it’s worth devoting a couple of hours of your time to, if you’ve never seen it before.
4
‘Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid’ (1969)
A movie about a pair of outlaws who go on the run after taking things a bit far with all their robberies and stuff, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid is effortlessly fun, and always has been. It’s old now, coming up on its 60th anniversary in not too much time, honestly (at the time of writing), but it’s timeless, so who cares? It doesn’t really feel like it was made in 1969.
Also, it’s obvious to say, but Paul Newman and Robert Redford are dynamite together on screen, even in the scenes that don’t involve actual dynamite. They’re so good together that you kind of wonder why, after Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, they only shared the screen in one other movie (The Sting, which is another crowd-pleaser directed by George Roy Hill, albeit certainly not a Western).
3
‘The Good, the Bad and the Ugly’ (1966)
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly is the best spaghetti Western of all time, and it also happens to be the most entertaining. You’ve got three main characters here, more or less alluded to in the title, and they’re all trying to get to some buried gold first, and that’s the movie. It’s three hours almost, all up, with an obvious MacGuffin, and also not much that could be called unpredictable, but that’s all good.
It’s more than all good. And it’s not bad, nor is it ugly. The Good, the Bad and the Ugly is phenomenally paced and also one of the best-looking movies of its time, and maybe of all time, too. What else do you need? What else can be said? It’s The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, for crying out loud.
2
‘Blazing Saddles’ (1974)
It is a parody of Westerns, yes, but Blazing Saddles is still a Western, just a very silly one. For what it’s worth, though, it gets the look and feel right, in terms of replicating classic Western films, which can also be said about Young Frankenstein and the old horror movies it parodied, with that movie coming out the same year as Blazing Saddles, and Mel Brooks directed both.
Sorry, that’s a bit of a tangent, but it’s always impressive how Brooks’s two best movies (and two of the funniest films of all time) came out the same year. Anyway, Blazing Saddles has non-stop jokes, and the vast majority of them hit the mark. You can hate Westerns and still find a lot to love here, or love Westerns, and enjoy this as a good-hearted parody. Or if you fall somewhere in between, that’s all good. This is a winning film in any event, really.
1
‘The Good, the Bad, the Weird’ (2008)
No one should be surprised to learn that The Good, the Bad, the Weird has pretty much the same premise as The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. There are three main characters, and they’re all after the same thing. They race each other, they compete, and all that expected stuff. It’s not so much the plot that matters here, though, because what is important is what The Good, the Bad, the Weird does tonally and regarding genre.
Like, it’s not necessarily a better movie than The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (like, not much is on that film’s level), but it’s arguably even more entertaining, owing to its emphasis on action, comedy, and some other potentially unexpected genres. It’s a film where it feels like every weird and/or creative idea was thrown into the mix somehow, and while the final product isn’t the most consistent thing in the world, by any means, it is ultimately ridiculously entertaining, and that’s the main thing worth considering, for present purposes.
The Good, The Bad, The Weird
- Release Date
-
July 17, 2008
- Runtime
-
139 Minutes
- Director
-
Kim Jee-woon
- Writers
-
Kim Jee-woon, Min-suk Kim
You must be logged in to post a comment Login