The Wild Bunch Review

The reputation is all about the violence and the reputation is only half right. Peckinpah and editor Lou Lombardo built the Agua Verde massacre from six cameras running at different frame rates, cutting between normal speed and slow motion inside single actions, and the technique has been copied so thoroughly for fifty years that it is easy to forget it was invented here. What holds up better is the quiet. William Holden's Pike is a man who has run out of countries to be useful in, and Holden plays him with a tiredness he was not often allowed.

Ernest Borgnine, Robert Ryan and Warren Oates fill out a gang that actually behaves like men who have worked together too long. Lucien Ballard shoots the Mexican locations in dust and hard sun with almost no romance in them. The film's treatment of women is indefensible rather than merely dated, and the middle section in Angel's village slows to a crawl. But the walk to the machine gun remains the most committed ending any western has attempted.