mbyrd02’s review published on Letterboxd:
Went into this one expecting something other than the heroic westerns of yore, but not something quite so nihilistic and full-on revisionist as The Wild Bunch is. Peckinpah has chosen to center the outlaw gang in this one, which isn't unique for the genre, some time is typically spent with the antagonists, but in this case the 'heroes' chasing the title Bunch are a miserable group of ragtag mercenaries who delight in corpse-robbing, led by a more honest man who dreams of rejoining the Bunch and knows he's far in over his head...all employed by a nakedly corrupt railroad. It's amidst this morass of moral ambiguity that Pike, Dutch, Deke and the gang wreak their havoc, looking for one last score before the proverbial closing of the West. It ends, as you might expect, in a hail of bullets and death. Scenes like the train robbery and canyon standoff, as well as the opening sequence intercutting a bank robbery with a temperance union meeting, are inspired examples for the genre, prefiguring later heist films as much as calling back to examples from earlier films. I'd be remiss if I didn't mention that this film has a keen streak of misogyny running through it. Jealousy over, and violence towards, a woman is central to the plot with no attempt made to understand her thought process. None of the women in this film have any agency to speak of and most are simple objects of desire. Nevertheless, I can't discount everything this film does right because of that. The average John Ford or Howard Hawks western makes me break out in hives these days, and while I appreciate post-revisionist films like Meek's Cutoff, something about the dark cynicism of The Wild Bunch spoke to me.
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