Maverick Review (1994) (Throwback Thursday Movie Review #3)
Director: Richard Donner
Writer: William Goldman
Starring: Mel Gibson, Jodie Foster, James Garner, Graham Greene, Alfred Molina, James Coburn
Release Date: May 20, 1994
Runtime: 2 hours 7 minutes

It’s Throwback Thursday, and this week I’m going back to one of my all-time favorite comedies from the nineties; a movie I loved as a kid and still love every bit as much today.

Maverick is one of those films where everything just clicked. The right director, the right cast, the right script, the right tone. Richard Donner had already proven he could pull off this exact kind of breezy, star-driven entertainment with the Lethal Weapon franchise, and here he brought that same energy to the Old West with equally satisfying results. This is just a flat-out great time at the movies, start to finish.

Mel Gibson plays Bret Maverick, a gambler and con artist working his way toward a high-stakes poker tournament with a massive purse. He needs to scrape together the entry fee, which means a string of hustles, schemes, misadventures, and close calls before he ever sits down at the final table. Along the way he picks up two traveling companions: Annabelle Bransford (Jodie Foster), a fellow con artist with her own agenda, and Marshal Zane Cooper (James Garner), a lawman who may or may not be everything he presents himself as. The three of them have tremendous chemistry, and the film basically runs on it for two hours without ever running dry.

Gibson was at his absolute peak here. Maverick is charming, witty, a little goofy, and completely magnetic in every single scene. Gibson had the rare ability to make you root for a character who is fundamentally a cheater and a schemer, because he plays it with such infectious good humor that you never stop enjoying his company. There is a looseness to his performance that makes it look effortless, and that is exactly what a role like this requires. He nails it completely. It’s no surprise, Mel Gibson is one of the greatest actors of all time to me, certainly my favorite.

Jodie Foster is gorgeous in this and plays Annabelle to perfection. The character is written as someone who is always working an angle, always performing, and Foster finds a way to make that quality both funny and appealing rather than off-putting. She has real comedic timing that doesn’t get discussed enough when people talk about her career, and her back-and-forth with Gibson is one of the highlights of the whole picture. Their relationship has just the right amount of tension and playfulness to it without the film ever needing to oversell it.

James Garner as Marshal Cooper is the cherry on top. For anyone who didn’t know, Garner was the original Bret Maverick on the 1957 television series the movie is based on, so casting him here as the lawman is a clever move that pays off beautifully. Garner brings his trademark easy confidence to every scene, and the dynamic between him and Gibson works perfectly. Alfred Molina is excellent as Angel, the antagonist who spends the film one step behind Maverick and getting increasingly furious about it, and James Coburn shows up as Commodore Duvall and brings that cool, lived-in screen presence he always had. Every piece of the supporting cast is doing real work.

The one I want to single out specifically is Graham Greene as Joseph, Maverick’s old Native American friend who resurfaces at exactly the right moment in the film. Greene plays Joseph with this dry, understated sense of humor that makes him immediately one of the most likable characters in the whole movie. Every scene he is in lands, and the running bit between him and Maverick about money owed is one of my favorite recurring gags in any comedy from this era. Joseph is one of my favorite side characters in any film from the nineties, and Greene deserves more credit for making him that memorable.

The movie keeps a wonderful pace throughout. It moves from one set piece to the next without ever dragging, and the humor never feels forced or out of place. It has that quality the best comedies from this era had, where the jokes come from character and situation rather than just someone saying something clever at the camera. The Danny Glover cameo is a perfect example of that. It is the kind of gag that rewards people who caught it and doesn’t punish anyone who didn’t.

My only real complaint about this film, then and now, is that it ends with a clear setup for a sequel that never came. The door was wide open and they never walked through it. That is still so disappointing, because I would have watched a franchise built around this cast and this tone without hesitation. The world needed more Bret Maverick. What we got was one film, and while it is a great one, it still stings a little that it stopped there. I wanted to see the two Mavericks get the money back. Come on!

Maverick holds up completely. It is just as fun and enjoyable today as it was in 1994, which is more than you can say for a lot comedies from that decade. If you haven’t seen it, fix that. If you have not seen it since the nineties, it is definitely worth going back to.

For my fellow physical media fans, this one is definitely worth adding to your Blu-ray collection. Grab it on Amazon and support the site while you’re at it.

Maverick gets a four out of five: COMMENDABLE.

TITAN’S DECREE:

If you enjoy this one, you might also like to check out my review of Hunting Season starring an older Mel Gibson or The Mummy (1999), the film that kicked off Throwback Thursday Movie Reviews here on the site. Or click here to check out more movie reviews.

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