The Gauntlet

Warner Bros. | Release Date: December 21, 1977

CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION

59	METASCORE Mixed or average reviews based on 10 Critic Reviews

Positive:

Mixed:

Negative:

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Critic Reviews

Critic score Publication By date

Roger Ebert

The Gauntlet is classic Clint Eastwood: fast, furious, and funny. It tells a cheerfully preposterous story with great energy and a lot of style, and nobody seems more at home in this sort of action movie than Eastwood. Read full review

Staff (Not Credited)

The well paced script is an effective mixture of worldliness and naïveté: despite the couple's graphic sparring scenes, in which Eastwood more than meets his match, their relationship remains curiously innocent; a kind of fugitive romanticism pervades. Read full review

David Ansen

For all its violence - the movie has an almost fetishistic fascination with the destructive power of gunfire - the mayhem in The Gauntlet is as harmless as a comic book. You don't believe a minute of it, but at the end of the quest, it's hard not to chuckle and cheer. [02 Jan 1978, p.59]

Gary Arnold

Vicious and hypocritical as it is, The Gauntlet remains an entertaining sort of disreputable show, considerably more proficient and interesting than junk melodramas in a dogged vein. Read full review

Stephen Godfrey

As slow as Eastwood appears onscreen, he's learned a thing or two about fast pacing as a director. The action is frequent, occasionally inventive, and, aided by some searing trumpet playing on the soundtrack by Art Pepper, fairly tense. Unfortunately, he overdoes it. [23 Dec 1977]

Vincent Canby

It is a movie without a single thought in its head, but its action sequences are so ferociously staged that it's impossible not to pay attention most of the time. Read full review

Staff (Not Credited)

In a major role reversal, Clint Eastwood stars in The Gauntlet as a person who might be on the receiving end of the violence epitomized in his famed Dirty Harry film series. Read full review

Pauline Kael

You look at the screen even though there's nothing to occupy your mind--the way you sometimes sit in front of the TV, numbly, because you can't rouse yourself for the effort it takes to go to bed.

EmpireNeil Jeffries

It's telling that the film is still only truly memorable for the closing five minute bulletfest, which turns Clint's bus into the only thing with more holes in it than the screenplay. Read full review

TV Guide MagazineStaff (Not Credited)

The violence is bloody, nonstop, and as pointless as the script. Read full review