A weird, horrifying film that somehow transcends its unlikely material […] Some kind of bizarre masterpiece. It’s probably not a movie that most people would like, but violence, with Peckinpah, sometimes becomes a psychic ballet. His characters don’t look for it, they don’t like it, and they negotiate it with weariness and resignation. They’re too beat up by life to get any kind of exhilaration from a fight. They’ve been in far too many fights already, and lost most of them, and the violence they encounter is just another cross to bear […] Sam Peckinpah [gives] us a desperate character he clearly loves, and [asks] us to somehow see past the horror and the blood to the sad poem he’s trying to write about the human condition. — Roger Ebert*