If anyone moves... kill them.

One of the most groundbreaking and relentlessly brutal films to come out of American cinema's radical reinvention as the sixties came to a crashing close, Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch helped rewrite the rules of what a Western could be, and destroyed the traditional understanding of on-screen violence in the process, while doing so with a level of artistic skill and raw, roaring impact that still sends shockwaves out to this very day.

Peckinpah, who'd already had two films under his belt with Ride the High Country and Major Dundee, finally broke into the A list with this snarling, relentless eruption of bleak cynicism and explosive violence. Enlisting a murderer's row of already well established figures of the genre, Peckinpah, taking cues from the sense of social disorder and anger that seemed to pervade American culture as the Vietnam War continued and the mammoth cultural upheaval of the sixties reached a climax, filtered it into that most American of genres, creating a film with a visible and tactile sense of id on display. From the opening bank robbery that turns into a main street massacre, to the hardened, morally bankrupt men we follow across the increasingly desolate landscapes of Texas and Revolution-era Mexico, to the creeping invasion of modern technology such as automobiles and machine guns that is undermining the traditional Western life, to the film's deliriously violent bloodbath finale, Peckinpah's film roars and snarls through it's expansive 145 minute length, as Peckinpah's visual style—freely blending slow motion, hyperkinetic editing, and expressive camera movements and framing—turns the West into a maximalist, darkly mythic moral wasteland.

But asides the groundbreaking violence and Peckinpah's relentless style, it's his equally dynamic and darkly majestic cast that brings the film to such visceral life. Icons like William Holden, Ernest Borgnine, Robert Ryan, Edmond O'Brien, Warren Oates, Jaime Sánchez, Ben Johnson, Emilio Fernández, Strother Martin, L.Q. Jones, Albert Dekker, and more, all operate at the absolute top of their games, the ruggedness of their performances giving them the aura of the last vestiges of the titans of a bygone era, while flawlessly in-tune with Peckinpah's brutally revisionist ethos. No one is morally pure or clean cut here, but rather all equally carrying the same dust, dried blood, and weather beaten gazes of those who's seen and done horrific things, and now find themselves in a world they increasingly cannot understand, yet are incapable of adapting to.

Lucien Ballard's groundbreaking cinematography is joined at the hip with Louis Lombardo's quick-fire editing, as the film's carefully constructed yet dizzyingly chaotic action sequences helped rewrite what an action sequence could be, as the eruptions of blood, explosions of dust and clouds of smoke combine in a harrowing symphony of violence, while Jerry Fielding's relentless and steamrolling score roars forth like a volcano, combining together modernist arrangements, Mexican folk tunes, and sharp renderings of more conventional Western musical cues into a robust work.

Groundbreaking and devastating in it's magnificent revisionism, The Wild Bunch didn't so much as kill the Western as shatter it into a thousand pieces and remold it in it's own image. No Western would ever be quite the same afterwards, and neither would any other American film, as the last inklings of the Hays Code censorship finally found themselves brutally beaten and cast asides, paving the way for the bold new age to come.

5 out of 5 stars.