The Wild Bunch is a 1969 American epic Western film directed by Sam Peckinpah about an aging outlaw gang on the Texas-Mexico border, trying to exist in the changing "modern" world of 1913. The film was controversial because of its graphic violence and its portrayal of crude men attempting to survive by any available means.

It stars William Holden, Robert Ryan, Ernest Borgnine, Ben Johnson and Warren Oates. The screenplay was by Peckinpah and Walon Green.

The Wild Bunch is noted for intricate, multi-angle, quick-cut editing, using normal and slow motion images, a revolutionary cinema technique in 1969. The writing of Green, Peckinpah, and Roy N. Sickner was nominated for a best-screenplay Academy Award; Jerry Fielding's music was nominated for Best Original Score; Peckinpah was nominated for an Outstanding Directorial Achievement award by the Directors Guild of America; and cinematographer Lucien Ballard won the National Society of Film Critics Award for Best Cinematography.

In 1999, the U.S. National Film Registry selected it for preservation in the Library of Congress as culturally, historically, and aesthetically significant. The film was ranked 80th in the American Film Institute's 100 best American films, and the 69th most thrilling film. In 2008, the AFI revealed its "10 Top 10" of the best ten films in ten genres: The Wild Bunch ranked as the sixth-best Western.

Plot Summary
In the Wild Bunch the movie opens with a group of aging outlaw's final score, a bank robbery. The event concludes with a violent and overtly bloody shootout that would generally mark the finale of a movie. This is correct in that it marks the finale of an era, for the characters and the world they live in. They simply can no longer keep up, the times are changing, technology advancing, and they're style of life is getting left behind in the dust that they spent so long galloping through. They abandon their careers for the simpler life of retirement. They enjoy this time, they live their fantasies. During this time the law is always on their tracks, bounty hunters. The further into their fantasy they get, the closer their demise seems to get. When one of their own is captured they are faced with the choice of escape or what is certainly a suicide mission to attempt and free their fallen behind comrade. For them it is not a choice. They all die in what can only be described as a nauseatingly gore filled bloodbath of a battle. They might have succeeded in removing themselves from the wild west however they could not be separated what is inherently their nature. The west was only wild because the wild bunch were present, they influenced their surroundings, not the other way around. It is only after the final shoot out that the bounty hunters catch up with them, now only bullet riddled corpses. They never got caught, they could never get caught because they were already trapped in their own personalities. They turned themselves in to their instincts. The vacation, the fantasy, was bound to end and they knew it. 

 It's 1913, and the traditional American West is dying. Among the inhabitants of this dying time era are a outlaw gang called "The Wild Bunch". After a failed bank robbery, the gang head to Mexico to do one last job. Seeing their times and lives drifting away in the newly formed world of the 20th century, the gang take the job and end up in a brutally, violent last stand against their enemies who deemed to be corrupt in a small Mexican town, ruled by a ruthless general.  

Outlaws on the Mexican-U.S. frontier face the march of progress, the Mexican army and a gang of bounty hunters led by a former member while they plan a robbery of a U.S. army train. No one is innocent in this gritty tale of of desperation against changing times. Pump shotguns, machine guns and automobiles mix with horses and winchesters in this ultraviolent western.  

A few months before World War I, an aging band of outlaws led by Pike Bishop rob a Texas bank intent on using the money to retire. When the robbery goes wrong, the gang is forced to flee to Mexico with Bishop's reformed ex-partner, Deke Thornton, in hot pursuit. With nothing to show for the failed robbery, Bishop's gang agrees to steal a shipment of guns for General "Mapache" Juerta, to restore their fortunes. With Thornton closing in, and their association with the evil Juerta trying their conscience, Bishop and co. prepare for their lawless past to catch up with them.  Written by Ronos

After a botched robbery attempt in Texas, Pike Bishop and his gang head south across the Rio Grande and into Mexico. They are being pursued by Deke Thornton and his men, made up of bounty hunters. They had been hired by the railroad to stop Bishop and his gang from robbing the rail depot and now have 30 days to track them down and kill them. Bishop and his men plan to spend only a short time in Mexico and then cross back into Texas to continue plying their trade. Their stay is lengthened however when they meet a violent Mexican general who wants them to rob a U.S. train carrying arms. They do so, but it leads to a violent and bloody final confrontation. 

Review
If "Shane" makes a myth of the West, "The Wild Bunch" demythologizes it... If "Shane" draws sharp moral distinctions that are, literally, black and white, "The Wild Bunch" spoils all moral distinctions, offering us only choices between different modes of immorality... If in "Shane" violence is viewed as a necessary evil only to be employed as a last resort, and killing is depicted as fast and pure, in "The Wild Bunch" violence is viewed with exaltation, and killing is prolonged, tormented, and bloody...

"Shane" delivered an old traditional story, a legend, a fabulous hero who idealized the West... "The Wild Bunch" presents it stormy, disturbing, hard to control, and blood-thirsty... In short, within the genre of the Western, "The Wild Bunch" is the precise opposite of "Shane." Each film may be considered an artifact of a view of the American frontier... "Shane," made during the quietude of 1953, romanticizes and idealizes... "The Wild Bunch," made fifteen years later in a turbulent time, tells us that the American Dream is dead...

The opening sequence of "The Wild Bunch" stakes out the virtue of the wild territory... A gang of desperadoes disguised as U. S. soldiers rides into a town, passing children torturing scorpions and adults attending a temperance meeting... The action starts inside the office when Pike, the leader of the bunch warns his men saying: 'If they move, kill'em!'

The Bunch robs the railway office, then finds itself ambushed by a gang of bounty hunters working for the railroad... A savage gunfight erupts, many innocents people are killed, and in few minutes, we discover that we are in middle of a territory full of rage and fury, in a terrain that is beyond good or evil, where the abusing use of force is beyond any reason...

Holden's group was never easy to handle... There is conflict and tension among them… They range from the more idealistic Mexican member, Jaime Sanchez, to the wild Gorch brothers, Warren Oates and Ben Johnson… But what binds them together in the last resort is their life-style and its demanding loyalty… Holden puts it this way: 'When you side with a man, you stay with him, and if you can't do that, you're some kind of animal, you're finished. We're finished. All of us.'

If there are any myths left unexploded in the film, they take place on the Mexican side of the border, where the bandits' departure from a village is staged as it might have been in "Shane." The time of the film is 1913, when the American frontier was closing fast... Mexico, on the other hand, was still a romantic era, the time of Pancho Villa and the Mexican Revolution...

Peckinpah's reputation was well known... He was an expert in violence, offering furious scenes with intense emotion and anger, even immoderately beyond the limit, making his film more important, more powerful, and memorable... Peckinpah sacrificed some two hundred people, most of them accentuated in slow motion, men falling with exaggerated blood flowing out their body...

We even witness the execution of one of Pike's man, seeing with astonishment how his throat is slashed with a knife... Mel Gibson carried it exactly and excessively, in his superb epic tale "Braveheart," when he showed us how a lovely bride is slain in the same way... His film was probably influenced by "The Wild Bunch" at least – as I think – with its technique and style.

The 'savor' of violence in 'slow motion' makes us understand the passion of Peckinpah toward violence... This pleasure for killing, this irresistible exhibition, this 'performance of death' as Peckinpah expressed it himself, could be interpreted maybe as criticism to violence.

"The Wild Bunch" is splendidly acted... William Holden as Pike, was never so magnificent since "Stalag 17" as I remember... It seems that Holden understood the message, specially in the brilliant scene when he clearly decides to rescue one of his men... This particular shot was outstanding because it involved Holden in a great embarrassment with zero dialog... Another proof was also the scene between Robert Ryan and Albert Dekker disputing about the bounty hunters, the 'trash' as Ryan called them.

The climax of the motion picture is astonishing... After Pike had shot the general, he and his pals stood 'peaceful' for a moment facing the Mexican soldiers... The wild bunch was already condemned... Nobody will survive... They were aware of it, we were aware of it... But in their mind, there was a certain determination to take with them as many Mexicans as they can... The seconds passed and in the moment that Pike puts a bullet between the eyes of a German adviser, we were in front of the bloodiest slaughter ever seen on the silver screen... Too much blood for a picture filmed in 1969... Mel Gibson exhilarating fashioned epic, repeated it in the battlefield in "Braveheart."

Now, if you consider "The Wild Bunch" a film against Classic Westerns, the action scenes are at its finest quality in the hijack of Pike's bunch to the army munitions train, and the long range shot, in slow motion, of the exploding bridge with Ryan and his bounty hunters.

"The Wild Bunch" depicts the Mexican music, life in the villages, their special cult to the death, their drunken fiesta, their women, the keen look at the Mexican face, especially the faces of the children, sometimes observers, sometimes participating in the whole twisted ethic of violence…

One last note: Desperation and death wish ride side by side in Peckinpah's motion picture... If the Bunch (Holden, Borgnine, Oates, Johnson, Sanchez and veteran outlaw Edmond O'Brien) are desperate, their bounty-hunter pursuers are no less so.