New at BOP: Review: Matrix Resurrections Movie Review: Moonfall Movie Reviews: Scream The #1 Movie in America November Forecast The Many Saints of Newark October Forecast New Trivia Question All site updates Share & Save   Tweet Print this column

I get that Sam Peckinpah is making a point with this violence. I am aware of it, and again, I admire The Wild Bunch for trying to be much more than the average, typical Western. I applaud the filmmakers. But that doesn’t mean I have to like it. Honestly, after a point, I almost threw up my hands and said, “I get the point. Move on.” The action here is visceral, and the opening sequence, where the wild bunch rob a bank but are beset upon by the bounty hunters, is an expert example of how to create and maintain suspense for a prolonged amount of time. But the message Peckinpah is delivering regarding how we treat violence in real life and in the movies, and how desensitized we all are only goes so far. I wouldn’t argue the point; however, we go from being desensitized to movie violence to acutely aware of it to just plain bored.

What The Wild Bunch has going for it, more than anything else, is a strong cast. Holden is, of course, one of the great American actors of the 1950s and 1960s. His versatility is what makes him so memorable here and in other films like The Bridge on the River Kwai and Sunset Boulevard. Pike’s painful memories may be explained in quick flashbacks (unnecessary ones, in my opinion, and also pretty ridiculous), but you can read the anguish this man experiences on his face. As his second in command and best friend, Ernest Borgnine as Dutch is also especially good, managing to have some form of honor even as he desires to do one last, potentially suicidal job, if only to get revenge. Edmond O’Brien and Ryan, as a grizzled old-timer and Deke, respectively, are also worthy of praise.

But The Wild Bunch is a film led by its director’s sensibility. If you can’t buy into the mythos of Sam Peckinpah (and at least for this movie, I’m not sure I can), the level of enjoyment you’ll have for The Wild Bunch goes only so far. The toughness exuded by the man - and this movie - is pretty cool, and some of the sequences here are genuinely tense and fraught with peril. But each of the sequences explodes in death, and after a while, the intentional shock value wears off, leaving behind pointless death for the sake of making a point about how pointless violence is. The film does argue strenuously, I think, about how the typical American Western skews the reality of the time it depicts to nostalgia. Again, I agree with the point, but the execution is repetitive and somewhat sloppy. It may be sacrilege to some to criticize Peckinpah, but the level of skill only goes so far here.

One day, I’m going to watch an old Western and I’m going to love it. Whether or not it makes a statement regarding how the world really was back then is beside the point. Most of the classic Westerns from this country — notably The Searchers, which I really loathe — are not movies I want to see again. I can’t say I hate most of them (The Searchers excluded), but a lot of Westerns do a great job of putting me to sleep. Stagecoach is so entertaining and the height of what the Western tried to achieve, that I wish every other film in the genre that I’ve watched could even come halfway to its achievements. The Wild Bunch, in many ways, gets very close to Stagecoach — I’ll say it again, the action, by itself, is pretty good — but it lies flat after a while, and extends itself to make a normal story feel overlong.

Continued:       1       2