Bad Westerns usually die in one of two ways. Some have no dust in their bones at all, just actors in hats wandering through a costume rack. And they’re usually cringe. Others understand the surface pleasures, then somehow turn horses, gunfights, revenge, outlaw myth, frontier towns, and moral danger into absolute cinematic oatmeal. So they’re not good enough either.
But then there are these five that are special disasters because they fail the genre in loud, weirdly specific ways. They miss texture, danger, humor, romance, dirt, rhythm, and the basic thrill of watching someone step into a street where death might be waiting badly. A Western can survive being messy. These movies make the West feel fake, dead, annoying, or worse, deeply embarrassing.
5
‘American Outlaws’ (2001)
Image via Morgan Creek Productions
American Outlaws is filtered through early-2000s teen-poster swagger, and the result feels like someone tried to make a Western for people who think dirt ruins the outfit. That’s so stupid. In the film, Jesse (Colin Farrell) is a cocky young outlaw, surrounded by a gang that looks less like post-Civil War rebels and more like a group assembled by a studio executive who had just discovered cheekbones.
The movie keeps reaching for outlaw charm, but there is no danger behind it. Robberies feel weightless. Romance feels waxy. The James-Younger gang gets sanded down into cute rebellion, as if frontier violence just needed better lighting and a hotter cast. Even the revenge angle, which should give the story some bite, gets swallowed by glossy nonsense. Now this needs to be understood very well because I’m not just saying it in bias. Western myths need sweat, consequence, and a sense that the characters have lived somewhere harsher than a mall-ad campaign. American Outlaws has none of that and gives you pretty people playing dress-up with rifles. That is not enough. Honestly, it is barely anything.
4
‘Texas Rangers’ (2001)
Image via Dimension Films
The deadliest thing in Texas Rangers is the pacing. For a movie about young men being shaped into frontier lawmen, it has an almost supernatural ability to make danger feel like paperwork. The film circles around Lincoln Rogers Dunnison (James Van Der Beek) who leads a cast of fresh-faced recruits trying to restore order under Leander McNelly (Dylan McDermott), and on paper, there is a real Western engine there: inexperienced boys, brutal territory, violent outlaws, discipline, loss, brotherhood, blood in the dust.
And somehow, the film turns all of that into beige noise. The characters do not feel forged by the land; they feel placed in front of it. The action has no sting. The dialogue keeps explaining courage without making anyone seem brave. Even the violence feels weirdly sanitized, like the movie is afraid of the roughness it desperately needs. A great Rangers story should feel like law being invented by exhausted men on horseback. This feels like a historical reenactment where everyone is waiting for lunch. It is not aggressively insane enough to be fun, and it is nowhere near alive enough to be serious.
3
‘Jonah Hex’ (2010)
Josh Brolin and Megan Fox as Jonah Hex and Lilah Black in Jonah Hex (2010)Image via Warner Bros.
How do you take a scarred bounty hunter, the supernatural, Civil War trauma, comic-book grotesquerie, revenge, dead men, weird weapons, and Lilah (Megan Fox) in full pulp-Western chaos mode, then make something this tiny and joyless? Weird. Jonah Hex should have been trashy gold. This film should have been ugly, mean, smoky, strange, and full of personality. Instead, it plays like a trailer for a better movie that everyone forgot to shoot.
Jonah Hex (Josh Brolin) is trapped under makeup and growling through a film that gives him almost nothing worth carrying. Quentin Turnbull (John Malkovich) plays with the energy of a man mentally checking his parking meter. The supernatural gimmick, where Hex can briefly speak to the dead, should give the movie a nasty campfire-horror flavor, but it gets used like a rushed video-game mechanic. The whole thing feels chopped to pieces, racing through plot beats without letting any image breathe. A Western comic-book disaster could at least be gloriously deranged. Jonah Hex commits the worse crime — it is bizarre and boring at the same time.
Collider Exclusive · Taylor Sheridan Universe Quiz Which Taylor Sheridan Show Do You Belong In? Yellowstone · Landman · Tulsa King · Mayor of Kingstown
Four worlds. All of them brutal, complicated, and built on power, loyalty, and the price of survival. Taylor Sheridan doesn’t write heroes — he writes people who do what they have to do and live with the cost. Ten questions will reveal which one of his worlds you were made for.
🤠Yellowstone
🛢️Landman
👑Tulsa King
⚖️Mayor of Kingstown
01
Where does your power come from? In Sheridan’s world, everyone has leverage. The question is what kind.
02
Who do you put first, no matter what? Loyalty in Sheridan’s universe is always absolute — and always costly.
03
Someone crosses a line. How do you respond? Every Sheridan protagonist has a line. What matters is what happens after it’s crossed.
04
Where do you feel most in your element? Sheridan’s worlds are as much about place as they are about people.
05
How do you feel about operating in the grey? Nobody in a Sheridan show has clean hands. The question is how they carry the dirt.
06
What are you actually fighting to hold onto? Every Sheridan character is fighting a war. The real question is what they’re defending.
07
How do you lead? Authority in Sheridan’s world is never given — it’s established, maintained, and constantly tested.
08
Someone new arrives and tries to change how things work. Your reaction? Every Sheridan show has an outsider disrupting an established order. Sometimes that outsider is you.
09
What has your position cost you? Nobody gets to where these characters are without paying for it. The bill is always personal.
10
When it’s over, what do you want people to say? Sheridan’s characters all know the ending is coming. The question is what they leave behind.
Sheridan Has Spoken You Belong In…
The show that claimed the most of your answers is the world you were built for. If two tied, both are shown — you’re complicated enough to straddle two Sheridan universes.
🤠 Yellowstone
🛢️ Landman
👑 Tulsa King
⚖️ Mayor of Kingstown
You are a Dutton — or you might as well be. You understand that some things are worth protecting at any cost, and that the modern world’s indifference to history, to land, to legacy, is not something you’re willing to accept quietly. You lead from the front, you carry your family’s weight without complaint, and when someone threatens what’s yours, you don’t escalate — you finish it. You’re not cruel. But you are absolute. In Yellowstone’s world, that combination of ferocity and loyalty doesn’t make you a villain. It makes you the only thing standing between everything that matters and everyone who wants to take it.
You thrive in the chaos of high-stakes negotiation, where the money is enormous, the margins are thin, and the wrong word in the wrong room can cost everyone everything. You’re a fixer — the person called when a situation is already on fire and needs someone with the nerve to walk into it. West Texas oil country rewards exactly what you are: sharp, adaptable, unsentimental, and absolutely clear-eyed about what people want and what they’ll do to get it. You’re not naive enough to think this world is fair. You’re smart enough to be the one deciding who it’s fair to.
You are a Dwight Manfredi — someone who has served their time, paid their dues, and arrived somewhere unexpected with nothing but their reputation and their wits. You adapt without losing yourself. You build loyalty through respect rather than fear, though you’re not above reminding people that the two aren’t mutually exclusive. Tulsa King is for people who are still standing when everyone assumed they’d be finished — who find, in an unfamiliar place, that they’re more capable than the world gave them credit for. You don’t need a throne. You build one, wherever you happen to land.
You carry the weight of a system that is broken by design, and you do it anyway — because someone has to, and because you’re the only one positioned to do it without the whole thing collapsing. Mike McLusky’s world is for people who are comfortable operating where there are no good options, only less catastrophic ones. You speak every language: law enforcement, criminal, political, human. That fluency makes you invaluable and it makes you a target. You’ve made your peace with both. Mayor of Kingstown belongs to people who understand that keeping the peace is not the same as being at peace — and who do the job regardless.
2
‘Wild Wild West’ (1999)
Will Smith, Salma Hayek, and Kevin Kline posing in a promo for Wild Wild WestImage via Warner Bros.
Wild Wild West throws James West (Will Smith), Artemus Gordon (Kevin Kline), Dr. Loveless (Kenneth Branagh), steampunk gadgets, post-Civil War tension, buddy-comedy bickering, spy-movie mechanics, and blockbuster spectacle into one massive studio machine, then somehow produces a film that feels both overstuffed and empty. The giant mechanical spider is not even the problem. Honestly, the spider has more commitment than most of the movie around it.
James West is trying to charm his way through a movie fighting him at every turn. Artemus Gordon gets buried under strained double-role business. Dr. Loveless is pitched so grotesque that the film keeps sliding from bad taste into uncomfortable silence. The jokes thud. The action has no clean rhythm. The gadgets have no wonder. The Western setting becomes decorative wallpaper for a blockbuster that cannot decide whether it wants to be a comedy, a fantasy, a revenge story, a buddy adventure, or a toy commercial. Every few minutes, you can feel money burning on screen. Not imagination. Money. That is the painful part.
1
‘The Ridiculous 6’ (2015)
Luke Wilson, Taylor Lautner, Jorge Garcia, Terry Crews, and Rob Schneider as Danny, Lil Pete, Herm, Chico, and Ramon, standing with guns drawn in The Ridiculous 6Image via Netflix
The Ridiculous 6 is the bottom because it does something worse than failing as a Western. It makes the genre look stupid without showing any real affection for why Westerns are fun in the first place. A parody can be dumb, filthy, childish, absurd, and still have a pulse. Blazing Saddles, for instance, understood the genre well enough to blow it up. The Ridiculous 6 mostly feels like people found a desert, put on costumes, and started throwing jokes at the ground.
Tommy (Adam Sandler) is a white man raised by Native Americans who discovers he has several half-brothers, and the group sets off through a long, lazy chain of gags, cameos, bodily-function jokes, fake toughness, and scenes that seem proud of how little effort they require. The Native humor is painfully ugly. The Western references are shallow. The cast is huge, yet almost nobody gets material that feels worth the trip. Even the stupidity has no speed. It just sits there, stretched across the screen, waiting for laughter the movie has not earned. It’s so bad that it’s not even fascinating in failure.
