Kevin Costner's Best Western Performance Is Streaming for Free

Kevin Costner received his breakthrough career role in a film in which he doesn’t really appear, at least in terms of his eyes and face. This is the acclaimed 1983 comedy-drama film The Big Chill, in which Costner was cast in the role of Alex Marshall, whose off-screen suicide compels Alex’s old college friends to reunite over a weekend for Alex’s funeral. Before the release of The Big Chill, Lawrence Kasdan, the film’s director and co-writer, decided to remove his scenes from the movie in which Costner’s Alex was originally supposed to appear through college flashbacks. Regardless, The Big Chill led to an enduring friendship and partnership between Costner and Kasdan, who promised, after The Big Chill, to give the actor a memorable role in Kasdan’s next directorial outing.

This was the 1985 post-modern Western film Silverado, in which Costner, who was 30 when the film was released, plays the scene-stealing role of Jake, an impulsive gunslinger who likes to shoot first and ask questions later. Costner’s magnetic live-wire performance in Silverado led to him being cast as Elliot Ness in the 1987 crime film The Untouchables, which made the actor a major star.

Moreover, while Silverado, which received Best Music and Best Sound Oscar nominations, wasn’t a box-office hit, the film nonetheless heralded a revival of the Western genre in Hollywood, where it had become verboten following the box-office failure of the 1980 epic Western film Heaven’s Gate. With its epic gunfight sequences, an impressive cast, and spectacular visuals, Silverado is one of the most purely entertaining films of its era.

Lawrence Kasdan Gave Kevin Costner a Star-Making Role

The fact that Kevin Costner registers so strongly in Silverado is an especially impressive achievement given the uncommon depth and excellence of the film’s cast, which is led by Kevin Kline and includes Rosanna Arquette, John Cleese, Brian Dennehy, Scott Glenn, Danny Glover, and Jeff Goldblum.

In Silverado, Costner’s Jake is the firebrand younger brother of Glenn’s Emmett, a cowboy who, as the film opens, is attacked by three gunmen in a remote shack, where Emmett kills the men and takes a horse. Emmett, who recently finished serving a five-year jail sentence for a murder he didn’t commit, then rides toward the town of Turley, where Emmett intends to meet Jake. On the way to Turley, Emmett encounters Kline’s Paden, a gambler and gunman who was robbed and left to die in the middle of nowhere.

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Paden accompanies Emmett to Turley, where they discover that Jake has been jailed for murder and is scheduled to be executed via hanging the following day. After Paden is arrested and placed in Jake’s cell, Jake and Paden conspire to free themselves while Emmett creates a diversion by burning the gallows. From here, Emmett, Jake, Paden, along with Glover’s sharpshooter Mal, leave the town as a quartet and head for the film’s titular town, where a climactic battle forms between the film’s sharply-delineated black and white-hat characters.

Jake is a firecracker. The sheer combustibility and exuberance of Costner’s performance symbolizes the film’s reckless spirit. Despite limited screen time, Jake emerges as the most memorable character within the film’s core quartet precisely because of Jake’s unpredictability, to which none of the characters in Silverado are entirely sure of how Jake will react in any given dramatic situation, including Jake.

Raiders of the Lost Ark Influenced Silverado

With Silverado, Lawrence Kasdan transported the energy and style of Raiders of the Lost Ark to the Western genre. Like Raiders of the Lost Ark, Silverado transcends its vast sources of inspiration and becomes a spectacular entertainment that feels and looks far removed from the various Western archetypes and traditions that the film glorifies through its revisionist presentation.

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Silverado is infused with the same adventurous tone and breakneck pacing that defines Raiders of the Lost Ark and the original Star Wars trilogy and is just as fun as those films. Like Raiders of the Lost Ark and the Star Wars films, Silverado features appealing heroes, despicable villains, and epic battles. Moreover, Silverado inspires audiences to want to play the role of cowboy, as Kevin Costner’s childlike Jake aspires to in the film.

Kevin Costner Is a Western Legend

In addition to launching his career, Silverado heralded the beginning of an enduring relationship between Kevin Costner and the Western genre, in which the actor has experienced spectacular career highs and lows over the past 35 years. Following Silverado, Costner returned to the genre with his feature directorial debut, the blockbuster 1990 epic Western film Dances with Wolves, for which he won Academy Awards for Best Director and Best Picture.

Costner reunited with Lawrence Kasdan on the ponderous 1994 epic biographical Western drama film Wyatt Earp, which was a commercial and critical disappointment. The actor followed Wyatt Earp with the 1997 post-apocalyptic Western film The Postman, his second directorial outing, which was a box-office and critical disaster. Costner later staged a comeback as director and star with the acclaimed 2003 Western film Open Range.

In 2018, Costner debuted as Dutton family patriarch John Dutton on the acclaimed television series Yellowstone. However, in 2023, he left the series to focus on his longtime passion project, Horizon: An American Saga, a four-part epic Western film, which Costner, who first conceived of the project in 1988, financed with his own money. The actor may return to Yellowstone to finish the series. Silverado is streaming for free on Tubi.