Convoy

United Artists | Release Date: June 28, 1978

CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION

47	METASCORE Mixed or average reviews based on 13 Critic Reviews

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Critic Reviews

Critic score Publication By date

Staff (Not Credited)

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. Read full review

Nathan Rabin

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. Read full review

Pauline Kael

Sam Peckinpah's happy-go-lucky ode to the truckers on the road--a sunny, enjoyable picture.

Chuck Bowen

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. Read full review

Dave Kehr

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. Read full review

EmpireKim Newman

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

Staff (Not Credited)

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. Read full review

Gary Arnold

Peckinpah is a filmmaking heavyweight, but in Convoy all he's doing is fighting off the boredom and frustration that grow out of coping with stupid material. [28 June 1978, p.E4]

Robert Martin

One good thing B-grade trucker movies have is a quality we can call non-intellectual honesty. As a rule, they have no pretentions to do anything other than amuse the viewer. Peckinpah tries to do more and fails. [03 July 1978]

Vincent Canby

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

David Ansen

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]

TV Guide MagazineStaff (Not Credited)

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

Andrew Sarris

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]