Wild Bill

Wild Bill succeeds as a character study of a man whose idiosyncratic code of justice eventually catches up with him. Bridges’ performance is a masterstroke of squinty-eyed bitterness, and he gets colorful support from Ellen Barkin (as kitten with a whip Calamity Jane) and John Hurt (as a dissipated British dandy). Read full review

Wild Bill is uncompromising almost to the point of orneriness. Director Hill takes you from one incident to the next, trusting you - or, rather, expecting you - to work out the connections among them. [01 Dec 1995, p.21]

Hill evokes the great westerns of the past—in particular "Shane" and "My Darling Clementine"— but his approach is essentially postmodern. Though Hickok is a hero from another century, his plight is thoroughly contemporary. Read full review

Director Hill usually makes rough 'n' ready films about men in action ("48 HRS," "Extreme Prejudice"). His change-of-pace 1993 Western, "Geronimo: An American Legend," caught many off guard. "Wild Bill" continues to exhibit this maturing filmmaker while retaining the boisterous tone of Hill's earlier films. Read full review

What Kasdan's "Earp" needed was more humor and better villains. "Wild Bill" has the humor and villains, the flash and energy, the fire and style. And when, at the end, Hill seems to throw it all away, it almost hurts. But you can say one thing about "Wild Bill": Unlike most movies, it has a lot to throw away. [01 Dec 1995, p.C]

However hamstrung it occasionally becomes, "Wild Bill" is impressive for a thoughtful, daring spirit and a charismatic hero, so unapologetically larger than life. Read full review

While Hill’s hallucinatory script — adapted from a novel and a play — is about the dangers of fostering your own myth, the movie fawns over its character’s legend rather than aiming for his murky reality. Read full review

In any case, for all its good points, this movie doesn't click, it never builds much dramatic tension or momentum, it doesn't communicate a clear vision of the man behind the myth, and it finally can't find a coherent narrative line to tell its (ultimately inaccurate) story. [01 Dec 1995]

This is a valiant but overcomplicated Western that aims to redraw the lines on Western mythology: with heroes as mere humans, and heroics as distortions of the truth. Read full review

Both as a modern Western and as a Hill movie, this is efficient but middling - which still, finally, means that it's worth catching. Read full review

The product is an ambitious but awkward movie that jumps forward and back in time; voice-over narration fails to smooth over the choppiness. Nevertheless, it's studded with haunting, melancholy sequences, and Jeff Bridges is one of a handful of contemporary stars with enough stature and substance to carry off Hickock's mythic resonance. Read full review

The movie tries for poetry and elegy in its closing scenes, and we can see where it's headed, although it doesn't get there. Read full review

The film ultimately comes up short when it has to deal with Hickok as something other than a legend; Hill is hampered as usual by his fixation on iconography. Read full review

With “Geronimo,” an honorable effort to right some wrongs done the Apache warrior in past movies, [Hill] seemed stifled by his commitment to history. And in “Wild Bill,” which he wants us to see as a psychological profile of a legend’s final days, he can’t for the life of him let go of the legend. Read full review

Overall, the filmmakers’ take on the subject is highly esoteric and fails to suggest either why Wild Bill has remained such a famous figure, or the irony in the fact that he has done so. Read full review

Walter Hill's "Wild Bill" is a too-literal evocation of the played-out frontier experience. It's imaginatively shot and bravely and even iconically acted by Jeff Bridges as Wild Bill Hickock, but it's numbed and numbing. [04 Mar 1996, p.32]

Wild Bill is handsomely mounted and nicely acted, but it's also strangely irrelevant, a big ho-hum of a movie. [01 Dec 1995, p.5G]

The elements never quite combine into a cohesive compound, and a lot of the dialogue - particularly Calamity Jane's - might have worked on the page, or even on the stage, but has a phony theatricality when uttered by people with cameras in their faces. [01 Dec 1995, p.3E]

An authentic-looking Jeff Bridges goes for the grit in an incoherently arty rendering (full of fuzzy-focus black-and-white flashbacks) filmed by action veteran Walter Hill. [01 Dec 1995, p.13D]

Despite its authentic feel for things Western, Wild Bill misses the big picture. Read full review

In the early going "Wild Bill" looks interesting -- an audacious wallow in violence and Western legend. Then 20 minutes in, writer-director Walter Hill puts his cards on the table. It's a dead man's hand. Read full review

Opening with a wearying series of nasty and violent episodes attesting to Bill's predilection for solving problems by shooting at them, and his nearly comic indignation at having his hat touched (men have died at his hand for committing that transgression alone), the movie quickly establishes a pattern of bad decision-making on the part of the writer-director. Read full review

Like the opium dreams that its eponymous hero becomes addicted to, this fragmented, trigger-happy account of Wild Bill Hickok's final years feels like a bad trip through every cheap western knockoff you ever had to sit through. Read full review

It's an out-of-control movie from an out-of-touch director/screenwriter; too frenzied to make sense, and too awful to tear your eyes away. [01 Dec 1995, p.12]