AD917’s review published on Letterboxd:
If the Men on a Mission movies of the 1960’s (The Magnificent Seven, The Guns of Navarone, The Professionals, et al.) often represented masculinity at its best and most functional—men of particular skillsets coming together for a job worth doing, a cause worth fighting for—The Wild Bunch details what happens when those Men are left without any Mission. When all that testosterone can no longer be channeled into anything constructive and it’s left to sit and spoil, turn self-destructive.
As much as it’s about the changing times and the end of the Old West, it’s equally compelling as a study of aging men at the end of their ropes. They’re tired and angry and always just a little liquored up; primed to make some very bad decisions. The only grace that’s left for them is found in loyalty to one another. They’ll go down, but they’ll go down together.
“When you side with a man, you stay with him! And if you can't do that you're like some animal! You’re finished! We’re finished! All of us!”
The most tragic figure is not Pike Bishop (William Holden) or any of his Bunch, but Deke Thornton (Robert Ryan). Reduced to riding with “egg-suckin’, chicken-stealin’ gutter trash” bounty hunters whom he knows would just as soon pick over his own carcass like they do all the others they come across. The only loyalty he has left is to his own word. Even if it makes him beholden to an institution he despises; even if it means his own fall from whatever grace he once might’ve had.
“We're after men. And I wish to God I was with them.”
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