It's a movie that exists almost entirely on one note -- a low, melancholy one -- and achieves what I thought would have been impossible for him Peckinpah: he's boring.
– Roger Ebert,
Chicago Sun-Times,
23 Oct 2004
rotten:
The mushy pretensions of Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid suggest either that [Peckinpah] has begun to take talk about his genius too seriously (it can happen to the best) or that he has fallen in with bad company.