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Home > Movies > Vince Vaughn's Wild West Comedy Show: 30 Days & 30 Nights - From Hollywood to the Heartland

Vince Vaughn's Wild West Comedy Show: 30 Days & 30 Nights - From Hollywood to the Heartland

(No longer in theaters)
  • Rating: R — for pervasive language and some sex-related humor
  • Director: Ari Sandel   Cast: Vince Vaughn, Ahmed Ahmed, John Caparulo, Bret Ernst, Sebastian Maniscalco
  • Running Time: 110 minutes
  • Reader Rating: Write a Review

Genre

Comedy, Documentary

Producer

John Isbell

Distributor

Picturehouse

Release Date

Feb 8, 2008

Release Notes

Nationwide

Official Website

Review

Vince Vaughn’s Wild West Comedy Show sounds like a blast: It’s wild-man Vaughn and a bunch of performers barreling across the country in a bus (with bunk beds) playing 30 shows in 30 nights, in homage to the Wild West troupers of the nineteenth and early twentieth century. Yee-haw, I love a good Wild West variety show! Disappointment sets in when it’s clear that there will be little in the way of variety. There are, for example, no women onboard, and nothing like rope tricks or cigars being shot out of squaws’ mouths. There isn’t even a lot of music. It’s Vaughn (the master of ceremonies), a few of his friends (child actor and producer Peter Billingsley, Justin Long, and, one night, Jon Favreau), and four youngish, intermittently funny stand-up comedians: Ahmed Ahmed, John Caparulo, Bret Ernst, and Sebastian Maniscalco. The director, Ari Sandel, never gives you a sense of how the shows were structured. He serves up snippets of routines, shots of the comedians pacing backstage (“I shit like seven times before a show”), and glimpses of pretty girls in the audience—and then it’s on to the next city. Eventually, Vaughn fades into the background and each comedian gets his own little bio, his own moment to show how he overcame life’s obstacles, and his own moment to shine. In Alabama, the comedians bring free tickets to Katrina evacuees and realize they shouldn’t be bitching about having to share a single motel room. After the last show, in Chicago, they hug and cry. It was undoubtedly a great experience for everyone involved, and the show itself might have been a romp. But as a movie, Vince Vaughn’s Wild West Comedy Show makes you think of the days in which troupes that didn’t deliver were run out of town, bullets pinging off their heels.

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