Based on the story of Pat Garrett, an honest lawyer, who has been hired by a group of wealthy cattle barons, who asked him to track down Billy the Kid, his childhood best friend, the thing that challenges him.
It's a movie that exists almost entirely on one note -- a low, melancholy one -- and achieves what I thought would have been impossible for him Peckinpah: he's boring.
The mushy pretensions of Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid suggest either that [Peckinpah] has begun to take talk about his genius too seriously (it can happen to the best) or that he has fallen in with bad company.
culturevulture.net
November 19, 2006
...it could've %u2014 should've %u2014 been [Peckinpah's] third or fourth masterpiece (that depends on who's doing the counting), and the movie he'd been building towards his entire career.
It's one of the great tragic true stories of the old wild West, the story of two outlaw friends ending up enemies as one turns over and becomes a lawman - expressly for the purpose of hunting down his friend.
