Review of The Wild Bunch (1969) by Hotelcentral — 17 May 2019

The problem with this film is that a great deal of time is spent showing the protagonists laughing, drinking, and wenching, and riding horses here and there, and after ten or fifteen minutes of this it starts getting very old.

The other problem, of course, is that the protagonists are all bad guys. They're not antiheros. You need to have some redeeming characteristics to qualify as an antihero. And if you're going to carry a movie you need some redeeming characteristics. Don Corleone had his family "honor." Tommy DeVito made for a funny psycho. William Holden and company are all fine actors, but their characters are dry as dust and we the audience are supposed to sympathize because they're ageing out of the outlaw business and the times they are a-changing. So never mind that they shoot up a bunch of civilians and a bunch of fellas from the US Army. Never mind that they shoot up a bunch of guys from the army of Mexico. We're supposed to go along with this. And, sorry, but I ain't buying.

Sure, the bad guys do a couple of things that might be described as "nice," but there's nothing in the film to explain why these particular characters would do things like this, since gold and profit seem to be their only motivation.

I wondered if my criticism of the film might be unfair because, after all, it was shot in 1969. Things were different then. But then I discovered that Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid was also shot in 1969, and that, as I recall, was a film about bad guys too, but a far far far more successful attempt at entertainment.