Maverick is trying to raise the $25,000 he needs for a high-stakes poker tourney in St. Louis. Still a few thousand shy, he rides into a desert town (on a jackass – there may be a subtle point here) to call in a marker from the local banker. Before he can collect, robbers bust in and clean the place out. More or less undaunted, Maverick presses on to Missouri, joined by light-fingered Annabelle Bransford (Jodie Foster) and lawman Zane Cooper (Garner).
Director Richard Donner (““Lethal Weapon’’), borrowing liberally from a dozen caper movies, paints with a brush wide enough to cover the Grand Canyon with one swipe. Writer William Goldman, usually better in this genre (““Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid’’), stumbles: marauding Indians, for instance, turn out to be a bunch of white guys in war paint; the real ones, led by Graham Greene, are whooping it up for a visiting archduke. Gibson is right at home as the wisecracking gambler, and Foster, though slightly squirmy in this burlesque, hints at a fine comic side. But it’s the veteran’s show. Garner wears his you-can’t-put-one-over-on-me character like a pair of fine weathered boots. With his breaking half-smile, he’s irresistible.
