overrated western does not hold up well

Rating: 3/10 (18 November 2008)

I saw this movie when it first came out, like, almost 40 years ago. Was it really that long ago? I guess it was. Anyway, I remember it as being a good movie and I haven't seen it since. So now I have kids who are teenagers and so I think, hey, maybe they'd like to see a good western, funny and entertaining, so I put it in my Netflix queue, and it finally came up last week and we watched it last weekend.
What a disappointment.
For the life of me, I cannot understand why I ever liked this movie or how it got the reputation it has. It is simply a bad movie that does not hold up well. What makes it bad? The one attribute I would give this movie is boring. Really boring. The scenes just dragged on and on and it got so that I just wanted it to end. Like the bicycle/Raindrops-keep-fallin'-on-my-head scene. What was Hill thinking? If he wanted to establish a relationship between Newman and Ross, the length of that scene could have been cut by about two thirds. Likewise later on, when the camera was panning across sepia photographs of the three main characters to illustrate them making their way down to Bolivia. Again, way too long. We already got the point, but still the sequence dragged on interminably. I actually hit the FF button on my DVD remote at one point and even at 2X, I was surprised how long it took to get to the end of that sequence.
And the chemistry between Redford and Newman was almost lifeless, like a glass of soda left out overnight. I don't why, but all the lines (like "who ARE those guys?") I remember as being funny just fell mostly flat. Also, a good actress can light up the screen; but Katherine Ross was about as incandescent as an sick firefly. True, she was not given much to do in this film, but what she did get, she did poorly, reciting her lines mostly in a dull monotone. It's as if she was anticipating her later role in "The Stepford Wives" (which, incidentally, was a much better movie than this one).
So I don't know why everybody thinks this movie is so wonderful; I did not find it so and I guess I will have to be in the minority.