City Slickers II: The Legend of Curly’s Gold (1994)

Starring: Billy Crystal, Daniel Stern, Jon Lovitz, and Jack Palance, with small roles from David Paymer, Josh Mostel, and Frank Welker
Grade: C+

You know what true friendship is? When you’re willing to suck the poison out of your best friend’s asscheeks.

Thankfully, it ended up being a false alarm in the movie, but the point stands. I guess they figured this was the only way to make us believe the bond between Mitch and Phil is just as strong as Ed’s was with them.

We’ll miss you Ed.

Summary

In a dream sequence, Mitch Robbins (Crystal) goes back to the grave of Curly (Palance), the trail boss he befriended in the first City Slickers. He makes an impassioned speech about how much Curly meant to him but in the middle of it, Curly jumps out of the grave and pulls him in. Mitch wakes up from the dream believing he buried Curly alive.

Fully awake because of this realization, he then gets the yearly phone call from his mother at 5:16AM. This time, it’s Mitch’s 40th birthday. As he fully recites his mother’s speech to him, his wife Barbara (Patricia Wettig, who looks more and more like Sarah Jessica Parker with each movie) even joins in on the fun. After the phone call, Mitch gets out of bed excited. As opposed to the first movie, this time he’s happy it’s his birthday. Barbara also promises that the kids will be at her sister’s for the night, so they’ll get the house to themselves. Following this, we see Mitch going on his morning jog with his now fully-grown cow Norman, the one he helped deliver from the first film. Work is good (He’s the station manager now) and they moved out of the city. Mitch has never been happier.

He goes to work at the radio station, and we see the station psychiatrist personality (Bob Balaban) talk to some weirdo guy on the phone about how he sees the clothes in his closet come alive. Heading to his office, one of Mitch’s employees Lois (Beth Grant) brings up how he was supposed to let his best friend Phil (Stern) go two months ago. Mitch did Phil a favor by giving him a job, despite no experience in radio or sales, but he’s costing the station money and sucks at his job. Mitch tells her he’s delaying the firing for now because Phil is getting cleaned out in his divorce, and he’s not in the best head space at the moment. He’s also still taking Phil to the convention in Las Vegas. Mitch goes over to Phil’s office to talk, only to find that he is the one calling the station psychiatrist with the weird stories. They discuss Phil’s troubles with the job, and how he’s thinking about getting back with his wife Arlene, which Mitch describes as trying to “breaking back into Alcatraz”. Phil admits he’s thinking about it because of his loneliness. Mitch invites him over to the house to hangout for his birthday and reminds him about the Vegas trip happening soon to try and cheer him up. Phil thanks him and talks about how lucky he is for having this job. Otherwise, he’d really go crazy.

They go to a big work meeting where Mitch tells everyone they should be anticipating a phone call to confirm they’ll be the New York affiliate of The Jerry Jackson Show, a big money maker for the station. They do get a phone call, so Mitch has Phil put it on speaker, but it ends up being Barbara with descriptive phone sex for the entire staff to hear. This causes Mitch to run across the table to pick up the phone. Mitch and Phil take the commuter train home. Once they stop, Mitch is positive he sees Curly twice. He runs after some random guy but is mistaken. On the drive home, Mitch wonders if Curly was a narcoleptic but Phil calms him down, knowing very well Curly is dead. They get home to find an annoyed Barbara telling Mitch his irritating brother Glen (Lovitz) is here. Immediately upon arrival, he asked her to make a sandwich (no crust) and started making long distance phone calls. As you can see, Glen is not welcomed. He’s the family member everyone hates. He stays at people’s houses until he’s thrown out, borrows money from everyone and never pays back, doesn’t work, and he quotes The Godfather movies daily. After Phil gets Glen going on The Godfather stuff, Mitch and Barbara talk about their family dinner and how to get Glen out of there. To get some time alone back at the house, Mitch sends Glen to stay with Phil for the night, so he and Barbara can have sex. That night, when Barbara goes to change, Mitch considers wearing his old cowboy outfit.

Something pokes him in the hat though, so he takes it off to look inside. We see it’s Curly’s hat, with his name inside of it, and Mitch finds a treasure map sewn inside the hat band. Apparently, there’s $1 million in gold waiting to be found!

He hides the map when Barbara comes back into the room. However, since he’s so focused on the map at this point, he acts like he finished and tells her to give him ten minutes to recharge the batteries. He tells her to hide somewhere in the house, and he’ll come find her. This gives him some time to look at the map more, but he’s distracted by Barbara calling for him, and the ghost of Curly he sees staring at him from the window. The next day at work, Mitch calls the station psychiatrist under a fake voice to ask him about the Curly problem, but he’s interrupted by Phil walking in, so he hangs up. Mitch tells him he saw Curly again, and he’s convinced he’s back from the dead to claim his hat since the treasure map is in it. There is also the name “L. Washburn” written on the map after the initial message of gold. In addition, there’s a piece of the map missing, but it doesn’t affect the trail or the “X” where it’s buried. As they talk about it, Glen walks in. This forces them to change the subject, and Mitch gives Phil the map on his way out. After this, Mitch and Glen talk in private, and Glen gives him shit for giving Phil a job over him, even though he called him way before Phil did. Finally, Mitch has enough of the whining. He admits he can’t count on Glen and reminds him how much he’s already given to him and how it backfired. This includes an ad agency job he got Glen, but he didn’t even show up to. Glen storms out after some more arguing, so Mitch has to go after him and asks for him to come to the Las Vegas convention with him and Phil as an apology. There, he can maybe make some connections.

Phil interrupts and grabs Mitch to tell him all he’s already found out about some details of the treasure map and how it probably has something to do with a train robbery on the Western Pacific Railroad. They go to the library to do some research, and Phil finds a newspaper headline with this exact statement from 1908, the same year on the map. The starting spot on the map is only 65 miles from Las Vegas. When they do the math, they realize the gold would probably be worth around $20 million today. Further looking into the newspaper, they see one of the guys on trial was “Lincoln Washburn”, same as the name on the map. They go back and forth whether they should pursue the gold, but Mitch wonders if it’s even real, as well as why Curly didn’t go after it even though he had the map in his hat the whole time. Concerns are washed away however, when they see in the old newspaper that the picture of Lincoln Washburn is that of Curly’s father because of the resemblance. The map is real!

Immediately following this, they head out to the desert, with Mitch telling Barbara he’s still in Vegas and that he can only be reached by his cell phone. Sadly, they’re forced to bring Glen too. They get their wagon, horses, and whatever else from a couple of ranchers, and Mitch lies to one of them, saying they’re seismologists. However, Phil blows this because he tells the other rancher every part of what led them there. Turns out the ranchers aren’t surprised because city people come to their place all the time looking for gold. Anyway, it’s off to find the buried treasure! Now, the trouble begins…

My Thoughts:

People hate on sequels too much.

I will say that if I was the mind behind City Slickers, I probably wouldn’t want to do a sequel. I could be coerced though. It’s a cheery movie beloved by audiences and was highly successful both commercially and critically. I could see why Billy Crystal and company would want to figure out a way to recreate that magic again. City Slickers II: The Legend of Curly’s Gold is nowhere near the first film (no one’s arguing that), but the movie as a whole is not nearly as bad as people would like you to think.

The upbeat atmosphere and lightheartedness are still very much there. City Slickers II still has a decent amount of laughs due to an always funny Crystal and what we already know about the personalities of the returning characters. Bruno Kirby’s Ed was a noticeable loss though. This is the first notable problem. It’s not that Kirby’s performance was amazing or anything, but the camaraderie with Mitch, Ed, and Phil was the whole point of the first movie. Though the character by himself may not have stood out, together they were strong. Going into this sequel, fans of the first film already have this built-in relationship with the three of them together. To take this away from us is tough to get over. Now in this film, we’re just supposed to believe Mitch and Phil are a duo and are best friends. In fact, they don’t even mention Ed or tell us how he’s doing, despite how important he was to these characters’ lives one year previously. This really bothered me. How do they not even mention him? According to the first movie, the trio were friends their whole lives. This sequel takes place a year after the first film. A sentence to describe their most complicated friend shouldn’t be too hard but not even acknowledging his existence is disrespectful to fans. I would even argue Ed was closer friends with Mitch than Phil was. I don’t think the duo of Mitch and Phil was strong enough yet for me to care this much for them without Ed. They needed the stronger personality to push them.

Now, I’m not a big fan of Jon Lovitz. Usually, he’s annoying and unfunny, but him playing the leech of Mitch’s family was pretty good casting. A character that is nuisance, a user, and a liar is tailor made for someone like Lovitz. The character itself, besides giving good comedic fodder to play off of for our already loved characters, has no redeeming qualities to him other than the fact he can immediately tell how many letters are in a word or a phrase (which serves no purpose), has a photographic memory, and can read a map. As the character is written though, he does nothing to make us feel for the character whatsoever. He only becomes useful to push the plot forward. Besides that, he just annoys the shit out of everyone, and Mitch is forced to feel bad and apologize all the time for shit Glen deserves to get yelled at for. Though it gave us some funny moments, it’s more frustrating because it dragged down Mitch, as he wasn’t given the freedom and spotlight that he had in the first film. I’m not going to lie though, Lovitz does get some laughs. When he explained to Mitch how he recently started an animal detective business, but he’s in and out of court because they’ve been accusing him of stealing the animals in the first place, you best believe I was chuckling.

It’s cool to note that Rick Moranis was the original choice to play Phil in the first movie but had to leave because of his wife’s illness. However, in this parallel universe where Moranis did in fact co-star alongside Billy Crystal, this sequel could potentially have been starring the trio of Crystal, Moranis, and Lovitz. Hypothetically, City Slickers II could’ve been a Jewish version of Three Amigos, and I’m mad we’ll never get to see it.

I’m still back and forth on the introduction of Duke, Curly’s twin brother. It seemed forced into the screenplay just to give them an excuse to bring back Jack Palance. I understand though. If you want to recapture what the first film did, Palance’s Oscar-winning performance was a big part of it. Here, Palance’s portrayal of Duke was noticeably different from Curly, which I appreciated. Duke served in World War II and loved the ocean, compared to Curly being a land guy. They gave us a pretty decent backstory this time around. It was much better than the vague stuff Curly gave us and though Curly was a man not to be fucked with, you could tell Duke had a “kill or be killed” mentality from the get-go. He had a bit more of an edge to him, a noticeable sliminess. He had a lot more personality than Duke and his wanting of that gold more than anything in the world translated well through Palance’s underrated performance.

It was pretty funny for him to reveal to Mitch he’s currently working as a fake pirate server at a seafood restaurant. Why didn’t Mitch make fun of him for that? Mitch as a character should have had loads of fun with him for something like that. It seemed out of character for him not to make fun of Duke more for it.

Once again, Palance and Crystal did very well together, but Duke doesn’t seem to interact with Phil or Glen at all, despite them being together for most of the movie. This seemed like a massive, missed opportunity on both the comedic and character development fronts. Had they had some conversations with each other that didn’t involve the map, we would’ve learned a lot more about Glen and Duke and why we should care more for them to succeed. Plus, it would’ve gave us even more humorous moments stemming from it. Can you imagine Jack Palance trying to bond with Jon Lovitz? That sentence is funny in and of itself. This is what we missed out on! Also with Duke, the explanations given as to why he didn’t just tell Mitch in the first place about the map after learning of his existence did seem far-fetched. It’s a bit of a give and take, I guess. The character was definitely forced, but the performance was good enough to win me over.

Do you know why this sequel isn’t half the film City Slickers is? It’s because it didn’t possess the heart of it. You didn’t feel the connection to these characters like you did before. City Slickers II was a comedy through and through, skating by on the comedic presence of Crystal, returning characters and settings, and a decent number of amusing moments. Even then, it’s still not as funny as the original. It tries harder with the jokes but once they get out in the sun again, there doesn’t seem to be enough that differentiates the movie (in a good way) from the first. Once the adventure kicks into high gear, most of the stuff that happens is predictable and not nearly as exciting, other than the stampede scene. Also, I still don’t get why Mitch had to chase that white horse. His explanation didn’t make sense, and they never discuss it further, even though he almost fucked everything up because of it.

There are still loads of quotable lines that keep the movie afloat though like when Phil suggests for the others to “eat him” if things go south and Mitch replying “Eat you? I don’t even like talking to you on the phone!”. Daniel Stern does a good job with the material given, but the character noticeably regressed. Then again, divorce can do that to a man. His reasoning for not staying with Bonnie, the woman from the first movie who he ends up with, is underrated. He explains how he had a fun time with her, but it was the first thing happening to him after only being separated from his wife for two weeks. It wasn’t going to last. Admittedly, this is a pretty good reason to write out a character. In a regular Hollywood picture, they’d be married, and Phil would’ve lived happily ever after. Unfortunately, in a comedy, you can’t have two happy men who are best friends. Someone has to suck at life so the other can be the advice-giver, forcing the character of Phil to get the shit end of the stick again. Did he have to regress this much though? I don’t know. It seemed like we were going through a bit of a retread with him. I loved seeing where Mitch was at in life. It was cool seeing him in such a great spot, with a good job and his beloved Norman all grown up. What a difference a year did for this character. Seeing Mitch in such a good place, compared to where he began the first film, made me realize how much I liked the character, and Billy Crystal’s portrayal of him. Crystal alone was a good enough reason for me to see this sequel.

By the time the ending comes around, with a climax that threw all my emotions out of whack, Mitch, Phil, and Glen have a conversation about how they didn’t feel like time was wasted. Despite everything that happened, they realized they learned a lot about each other, strengthened their relationships, and truly found out what they’re made of as humans. As I look at City Slickers II: The Legend of Curly’s Gold, I felt very similar to how they felt. I don’t think I wasted my time. I feel good. Is that weird? I still had fun, and it was great to revisit this world and these characters. Obviously, it wasn’t going to hold a candle to the first film but if you’re a fan of it, there’s a surprising number of positives coming from this sequel.

Should it have been made in the first place? Probably not, but I don’t hate its existence.

That’s not nothing.