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Top 100 Movies Of The 1990's: #27 Kingpin

Box Office: $25.0 Million

Oscar Nominations: None

Oscar Wins: None

MovieRankings.Net: 71/100

Available To Stream: Max, Amazon Prime

Bill Murray is the funniest man of my lifetime. Take the 1979-80 Saturday Night Live season. John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd left the show to focus on movies. Chevy Chase was long gone. Murray and Garrett Morris were the only full-time guys in the cast. Can you imagine an SNL cast with only two men? Murray was in nearly every single sketch and was hysterical in each one. It's one of the greatest seasons by anyone in television history.

Take that season and all of his movies and the thing that makes me laugh the most is Bill Murray as Big Ern in Kingpin. It's not his best movie but you could make a strong case that it's his funniest. Him screaming with what's left of his hair flying all over the place is one of my favorite things of all-time.

Giphy Images.

This movie would easily crack the Top 100 with just Big Ern. When you add in Woody Harrelson as Roy Munson and you have a pretty incredible movie. If there wasn't a comedy bias with the Oscars, you could make a real case both should have gotten Oscar nominations. At times in a very goofy movie, you have Harrleson doing some very good acting. He's mixing having the soul of someone with lost dreams with the humor of playing a total loser.

The comedy in Kingpin is pretty wildly inconsistent. Some of the Amish stuff with Randy Quaid works really well. It also loses its luster quickly. But unlike most comedies, the third act of this movie is the best. The bowling tournament is one of the best competitions in movie history. Aside from it being hysterical, it's really well shot, the music is great and it's legitimately hysterical.

I'm so glad they didn't make a sequel to this. It was a box office failure when it came out for The Farrelly Brothers who were just coming off Dumb and Dumber. Kingpin opened during the Atlanta Summer Olympics which I'm sure didn't help. It also opened in 5th place behind A Time To Kill, Independence Day, Phenomenon and Courage Under Fire. It was out of the Top 10 in four weeks.

It found more success in video rentals and on cable. I feel like for a lot of people now, it may not be held in the same standard as Dumb and Dumber and There's Something Mary but right there in the next tier. There is also something timeless about Kingpin. I don't know if it's because bowling and the Amish don't change much or if it's just because the performances are that good. Whatever it is, I've been getting a laugh of Kingpin for almost 30 years now.

Long live Big Ern. He's the greatest! He's above the law!

27. Kingpin

28. Donnie Brasco

29. Heat 

30. Terminator 2: Judgement Day

31. Rounders

32. Unforgiven

33. Trainspotting

34. The Game

35. Out Of Sight

36. Carlito's Way

37. Seven

38. L.A. Confidential

39. Speed

40. Gattaca

41. Misery

42. Tombstone

43. Ransom

44. Wayne's World

45. The Insider

46. Back To The Future Part III

47. A Bronx Tale

48. The People Vs. Larry Flynt

49. Eyes Wide Shut

50. The Sandlot

51. Happy Gilmore

52. Contact

53. The Green Mile

54. Man On The Moon

55. Boyz N The Hood

56. Grosse Pointe Blank

57. Independence Day

58. The Rainmaker

59. Go

60. The Firm

61. Magnolia

62. The Talented Mr. Ripley

63. Tommy Boy

64. The Usual Suspects

65. In The Line Of Fire

66. My Cousin Vinny

67. Awakenings

68. JFK

69. Toy Story

70. Home Alone

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71. Jerry Maguire

72. Titanic

73. Billy Madison

74. Apollo 13

75. Braveheart

76. Edward Scissorhands

77. Cape Fear

78. The River Wild

79. What's Eating Gilbert Grape?

80. 12 Monkeys

81. Stir Of Echoes

82. Mission: Impossible

83. Total Recall

84. Quiz Show

85. For Love Of The Game

86. Being John Malkovich

87. Men In Black

88. Scream

89. Alive

90. Three Kings

91. Glengarry Glen Ross

92. Die Hard With A Vengeance

93. The Blair Witch Project

94. Twister

95. Dirty Work

96. Election

97. Tremors

98. Any Given Sunday

99. The Wedding Singer

100. Clerks