URBAN COWBOY

title: URBAN COWBOY

year: 1980

cast: John Travolta, Debra Winger, Scott Glenn

rating: **1/2

What a miscast... instead of a Jan-Michael Vincent or Tom Berenger type, an ultra-skinny Italian (John Travolta) plays a country boy Texan who wants to be a real Cowboy and then, after getting a roughneck job and meeting a flirty barfly (Debra Winger), is introduced to a bar room mechanical bull: becoming the only thing resembling a plot in this overlong Country soundtrack disguised as a big budget film (or vice versa). John Travolta yearns to be the mechanical bull riding champ: all the while breaking up with his girlfriend turned wife, shacked with ripped badass Scott Glenn who gets beat up by twiggy Travolta in an inevitable, and completely unbelievable, climax. So-bad-it's-good at times, and downright boring at others, this silly yarn does have a heart... beating somewhere. But what really matters is the geography. Not of Texas, but the giant nightclub Gilleys, a sort of city, and character, within itself.