In the summer of 1994, movie studios clearly thought they had found a hack to bring back the Western genre as a viable box office mainstay. The scam? Hide your horse opera inside a mid-budget comedy. Check out this list: Lightning Jack, Maverick, The Cowboy Way, and Wagons East! all released between March and August of that year, as did City Slickers II: The Legend of Curly's Gold. And to paraphrase many critics and audiences at the time, didn't we say all that we could say with the first City Slickers? Is it reasonable to make an adventure franchise out of the 1991 midlife crisis comedy that just so happened to take the box office by storm?
Owen Gleiberman really hit the nail on the head in Entertainment Weekly's review of the film. He wrote, "City Slickers II is pleasant but vacuous — The Treasure of the Sierra Madre replayed as a lightweight yuppie caper...I vegetated amicably at City Slickers II, but there’s still a desperation behind the movie’s innocuousness.&quo…