Sam Peckinpah, who knows much about real-life violence and is glad to share his findings, begins this movie with a worthwhile lesson on the maiming effects of bullets -- the weeks in hospital, the months in therapy. But he permits James Caan to make a near-complete recovery and to compensate for his slight handicap with an advanced degree in cane-fighting. After that, Peckinpah settles for glibness -- in the plotting (double- and triple-crosses in an assassination corporation under contract to the CIA), in the philosophy kicked around casually between professional gunmen ("There's not one power system that really cares about a civilian"), and in the he-man characterizations (Bo Hopkins hangs his head and mumbles under his breath, mortified to admit that his first name is "Jerome"). A couple of the action sequences are given a complicated construction, but mostly Peckinpah's stylistics -- slow-motion stunts, ping-pong parallel cutting -- have gotten, through repetition, to be as mechanical and lifeless as Orson Welles's. With Robert Duvall, Arthur Hill, and Burt Young. (1975) — Duncan Shepherd
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