The Wild Bunch (1969)
★★★★½
Full disclosure: I'm not a big fan of Westerns. My Western origin story pretty much stops at The Lone Ranger reruns and Bonanza as a kid in the 70s, plus Unforgiven, which I gave five stars to and think is near perfect. I loved HBO's Deadwood, too, but Westerns usually don't grab me. The pacing drags, and I get restless.
But The Wild Bunch floored me. Sam Peckinpah blew up 10,000 squibs in 1913 Texas and Mexico, with an epic about aging outlaws who realize they are becoming irrelevant. I'm on the high side of my fifties, so I can’t tell you how much I relate to that.
William Holden leads a bunch of guys who've killed for a living, and they're now scraping together one last job before the US and Mexican military and train company buries them. It's long, vicious and exhausting, and I needed two sittings because it frankly wore me out.
What hit me is that this is where Quentin Tarantino and Paul Thomas Anderson learned how to shoot violence. The carnage, the way Peckinpah lingers on bodies getting torn apart, and the slow-mo operatic bloodbaths that somehow feel tragic instead of cool. You can draw a straight line from this film to Reservoir Dogs, Kill Bill, and There Will Be Blood.
And suddenly Unforgiven made way more sense to me. Clint Eastwood was responding directly to this movie, taking Peckinpah's nihilism and moral rot and asking if redemption was even possible after all that killing. The Wild Bunch says no. These guys walk into the final gunfight to rescue Angel, knowing they're already dead men walking.
The world Peckinpah built felt real and lived-in. The prostitutes actually look like women who've worked hard lives in a border town, not Hollywood extras in period costumes. Both young girls and older women carry their history in their faces. It's misogynistic as hell in how it uses them, but at least they register as actual people instead of Hollywood polish.
If you've played the Red Dead Redemption games, The Wild Bunch is your holy text. The Van der Linde gang's "one more job" delusion, Dutch's charismatic rot, the Mexican Revolution chaos, that whole doomed outlaw-as-dinosaur tragedy Rockstar built their masterpiece around? Peckinpah got there first but was meaner about it. Christian Cantamessa, the writer of the first Red Dead, cited this as a direct influence, and I felt it in both games, the second being my favorite video game of all time.
The Wild Bunch is a masterpiece. It's the cornerstone of revisionist Westerns, the film that killed the John Wayne mythology. It's ugly and brilliant, and it made me realize I need to watch more classic masterpieces like this. But it does mark the end of my watch of all of Quentin Tarantino’s Seven Perfect Movies.
It's not quite the all-timer that Unforgiven was for me, but I recognize it's the film that made Unforgiven possible.
Watched: 2026-02-07 | View on Letterboxd