Kiefer Sutherland And Woody Harrelson's Goofy Western Is A Fascinating '90s Relic

The fish-out-of-water formula has been popular with filmmakers since close to the medium's inception, but it became a license to print money in the 1980s when "Beverly Hills Cop" and "Crocodile Dundee" grossed over $300 million worldwide on budgets of $13 million and $8.8 million, respectively. Suddenly, everyone was trying to develop commercially viable premises that might make a similar box-office killing.

Classics like "Big," "Back to the Future," and "Witness" proved the formula could be tweaked in a myriad of inventive ways (or serve as grist for a serious cop thriller), but too often the creativity crashed to a halt once they matched an outsider with an unfamiliar setting. Such was the case with "The Cowboy Way," a dreadfully unfunny 1994 comedy starring Woody Harrelson and Kiefer Sutherland as a couple of bona-fide cowboys who leave the rustic comfort of their home in New Mexico to search for a friend's killer in New York City.

Harrelson and Sutherland are actually a promising pairing, but the screenplay credited to William Wittliff, who was no slouch in the cowboy department, having written the celebrated miniseries adaptation of Larry McMurtry's "Lonesome Dove," felt woefully undercooked. In reality, it was likely way overcooked, given that producer Brian Grazer told Variety's Army Archerd in 1993 that he'd been trying to get the film made for six years. According to Harrelson in the same article, Kevin Costner had been attached at one point and even wrote a draft of the screenplay. Brad Pitt was courted as well, which tells me that there were likely several uncredited writers doing passes and punch-ups along the way.

Whatever went on behind the scenes, director Gregg Champion wound up making the worst summer movie of the 1980s in 1994.

The charming (though extremely dated) "Crocodile Dundee" was clearly the template for "The Cowboy Way." Rather than flummoxing a bad dude with an absurdly large knife like Paul Hogan, Woody Harrelson and Kiefer Sutherland break out lassos. Unfortunately, they made the mistake of emulating the lousy, action-heavy "Crocodile Dundee II." There's also a "City Slickers"-in-reverse element to "The Cowboy Way," but aside from Ernie Hudson as a friendly New York cop, our heroes don't meet any interesting characters. They're all NYC stereotypes that had become yawningly familiar a decade prior (they might as well have gone all the way with the 1980s inauthenticity and shot the movie in Toronto).

In lieu of writing potentially amusing set pieces, Champion and company fall back time and again on Harrelson doing goofy stuff in a posh setting. He seduces a woman at a fancy restaurant by making obscene gestures with a wine bottle, and expresses unenlightened (i.e., casually racist) thoughts to Hudson. It's as if they saw "White Men Can't Jump" and thought Woody being Woody was the film's secret sauce rather than Ron Shelton's razor-sharp screenplay.

I feel comfortable saying there's not a single laugh in "The Cowboy Way" because I had the misfortune of seeing this flop during its ultra-brief theatrical run in the summer of 1994 (not too soon after lamenting the tired fish-out-of-water antics of "Beverly Hills Cop III"). The only audible reaction to the movie came from people leaving their seats and exiting the theater. Bad movies happen all the time, but it takes effort to make a stinker of this magnitude. To that end, it should be made available to watch for free. For educational purposes. For our children.