Convoy (1978) - Critic Reviews

70

Time Out

The narrative goes a bit over the top in the second half, but it's after a large dose of the best kind of escapist good humour.

70

Nathan Rabin The Dissolve

Convoy has one huge advantage over the song that inspired it: It’s one thing to hear about a mighty convoy, but it’s quite another to see it. There’s a certain tacky, truck-stop grandeur to witnessing so many huge vehicles traveling together like a pack of steel, gasoline-fueled animals.

63

Chuck Bowen Slant Magazine

At its best, the film finds Peckinpah moving into a new poetry of non-violence, of movement associated with explicit, actualized harmony, but the director doesn’t trust himself, mistaking change of form for impersonal commercial stewardship.

63

Dave Kehr Chicago Reader

It looks like a potboiler: only a few of Peckinpah's themes are present, and they're mostly left undeveloped. But Peckinpah can still stage a fight scene better than anyone, and the film establishes its own crazy rhythm as it runs off wildly through most of the southwest.

60

Kim Newman Empire

A noisy but enjoyable destruction derby of a film, sadly with none of the subtlety, invention or skill of Spielberg's Duel.

50

Variety

Sam Peckinpah’s Convoy starts out as Smokey and the Bandit, segues into either Moby Dick or Les Miserables, and ends in the usual script confusion and disarray, the whole stew peppered with the vulgar excess of random truck crashes and miscellaneous destruction.

40

Vincent Canby The New York Times

The movie is a big, costly, phony exercise in myth‐making, machismo, romance-of-the-open-road nonsense and incredible self‐indulgence.

30

David Ansen Newsweek

When a director as gifted, personal and eccentric as Peckinpah makes a film as gaseous and ludicrous as this, the temptation is to laugh, but the spectacle of his continuing skid is a sad one. [10 July 1978, p.83]

25

TV Guide Magazine

Kristofferson's performance is as monotone as his singing, showing few changes in dramatic emphasis. Unmotivated story riddled with confusion and disarray.

20

Andrew Sarris Village Voice

Sam Peckinpah's Convoy is not merely a bad movie, but a terrible movie. Anyone can make a bad movie--only a misguided talent can manage to be terrible. [17 July 1978, p.44]