So this is a Sam Peckinpah Western, and I can say with great relief that it is the last goddamn Western on this list. It is just baffling to me the hold that this genre continues to have on critics to this day; I suspect that by the 2032 list or so, there might be one token western left on the list somewhere, but not this wild profusion.

That said, despite being a western, this isn’t a completely terrible movie. Mostly what it is, though, is just a mildly well-executed popcorn movie. It’s a movie you’d go see on a Saturday, and forget about by Monday. It’s the Transformers or Fast & Furious of its day. There’s just not a lot to it.

So why do critics put it on this list? Seems like two reasons: The first is that this is viewed as a film about the dying of the Old West (it’s set in 1913, and a machine gun that features heavily in it prefigures the war to come) and being made in 1969, it’s one of the last of the “great” Westerns, too. So it’s got that going for it, which is nice.

But the main thing that critics are all about is that it’s super-violent, and they want to stroke their chins about this, apparently. Ebert’s original review from 1969 is illustrative this way:

I suppose “The Wild Bunch” is the most violent movie ever made. Hundreds of men, women and horses are slaughtered. A man is dragged behind a horse. Throats are slit, broken, strangled. Blood flows in an unending stream. Thanks to recent advances in special effects, the blood actually spurts when somebody gets shot; there are geysers of blood everywhere. A friend of mine describes “The Wild Bunch” as being 200 simultaneous blood transfusions with no recipients. … I am aware that the shootings in “The Wild Bunch” are the most realistic ever filmed. But realism is not the same thing as reality. The wounds look terribly real in “The Wild Bunch,” yes, but it is impossible to forget that this is a movie. Indeed, the extreme realism of “The Wild Bunch” actually reminds you that it’s a movie.

So here’s the thing: By modern standards, there’s nothing real about it at all. The geysers of bright crimson that erupt out of people look like paintball hits, all the more so when “blood-stained” clothes are bright pinkish red even when the blood should be dried. Dudes flop off of roofs in precisely the way you think of stagey old-timey cowboy deaths happening. If you want a movie with realistic violence, man, you have so many more options today; this isn’t even in your top hundred.

What it actually reminds me of is videogame violence. There’s a scene at the end in particular that could be the adaptation of a cover shooter: There’s a machine gun mounted on a tripod, there are pillars to stand behind, waves of enemies come in through some arches, &c. Hundreds of people get shot, but it’s all just meaningless popcorn violence, because despite the blather about hyper-violence, this is really just a fluffy action movie where the director enjoyed shootin’ shit up, the John Wick of its day.

EXCEPT FOR ONE THING, which is that of course it’s soaked in vile misogyny, and every woman in the movie is treated as an object, whether it be the many bosom-baring prostitutes, or the ex-girlfriend that one of the protagonists shoots and kills because she left him to be with someone else. To a modern viewer, this shooting — with its echoes of so many recent real-world horrors — is far more disturbing than the silly river-of-blood stuff, but the film passes over it quickly and with little fanfare, and yeah.

(The other disturbing thing is the scene early in the movie where a bunch of kids are laughing and playing… with a scorpion that they drop into a nest of fire ants and watch it die, after which they set the whole thing on fire. I suspect the director meant that to be a metaphor for the rest of the movie, but all I could think of was that toys definitely sucked in those days.)

Anyway, as westerns go, this isn’t the worst one I’ve seen, but… yeah, I’m still super-stoked that I never need to watch another western ever again in my whole life.