I'm not even a huge fan of westerns, but this movie is one of my favorites. Great characterization, action, and memorable dialogue. Newman really stands out. Seems like every time I catch it on TV, I end up watching it all the rest of the way through. Which is what just happened last night. The 8.2 rating here at this site seems a bit on the low side, though.
shareIt's perfect. Not sure who would even dare to give it anything below 7.
10/10 from me. One of my all time favorite movies that defines why Hollywood was awesome. Not anymore.
I give it a 5 or 6. There isn't a very strong narrative. It's almost just a sequence of things that they do or happen to them, with no real ongoing plot. It really seems like a case of style over substance.
It's not a bad movie, but for me I found it to be very disappointing given it's reputation. I wouldn't even put it in my Top 100 Westerns list.
I'm surprised the rating is so high. Don't get me wrong: Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid is one of my all-time favorite movies. But it's going through a revisionist-criticism phase and it has taken quite a beating. It's on the downalator on the AFI Top 100, dropping 23 places between 1997 and 2007. It won't be on the next version of the AFI Top 100.
The minority view in 1969 when this movie was released—that Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid wasn't much of a western next to, say, Red River or even its contemporary, The Wild Bunch—has in the past twenty years become the zeitgeist. Roger Ebert gave Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid 2½ stars in 1969 and called it a "turkey" on a 1990 TV episode of "Siskel & Ebert." In his written review for the Chicago Sun-Times he takes particular issue with the "unbelievable dialogue" at the end of the movie.
I could listen to that dialogue every day for the rest of my life. I don't care whether the dialogue at the movie's end is unbelievable. It's hilarious. Of course it's unbelievable. It's supposed to be a comedic moment and, of course, in real life (assuming a scene like this occurred) there was nothing funny going on. So what?
The Wild Bunch almost certainly has real dialogue. I imagine soldiers, mercenaries, low-lifes, and cowpokes really talked that way in the early 20th century. But real or not, that dialogue is unlistentoable most of the time. I can watch The Wild Bunch with the sound off. But with the sound on it's a turkey. Give me Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid any day.
I feel this is one of the worst westerns I've watched. I had trouble getting into the plot, didn't care anything about the characters and don't see the hype.
I read various summaries of the movie in case I blanked out during the movie as to why I did not enjoy it, but I didn't since I remembered seeing what was listed.
3 / 10 - top 10 over-rated movie of all-time
Yes, well, join the crowd. They went thataway.
shareThat would be me. Me, dragging the ratings down. I didn't like it much. ( I did like bits of it and I did like the actors in some scenes). But I simply could not and cannot warm up to it and give it a high rating. I can see why it's widely beloved, like Honey Boo Boo or the Duck people. Not me, no thank you.
shareIm asking why an 8.2 in the first place. What the hell was so brilliant that we didn't see in better movies like the Wild Bunch or Treasure of Sierra Madre. All Newman and Redford did was trade jokes like Abbott and Costello, duck and cover from the posse that was chasing them. And then they go to Bolivia and basically repeat the same schtick as they did in America.
The only reason this movie was a big deal was Burt Bacharach music, and their Freeze Frame headlong rush into triple volley of Bolivian bullets.
No mention of their life with the Wild Bunch or the fact that they were in San Vincente whooping it up for days contrary to their usual precaution of keeping a low profile and drawing attention to themselves.
And either they bled to death or committed suicide nobody today knows for sure. But the Butch and Sundance in this movie were more Keystone Kops with their blowing up the whole safe and boxcar with it.
And Etta Place was just window dressing, her character undeveloped. A waste of Katherine Ross who had done so well in the Graduate a year earlier.
Among other things I would quarrel with your assessment that Redford and Newman traded jokes like Abbott and Costello. They gave us a vaudevillean baggypants routine. And if nothing else, the Redford-Newman exchanges are decidedly modern. In fact they presage the modern comic buddy movie, perhaps because virtually every buddy movie since then has paid homage to Redford and Newman through blatant imitation.
"Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid" breaks down for me because it doesn't know what kind of movie it wants to be. Despite the cowboy hats and horses, it ought to have been unclassifiable, sui generis; and yet for all the right reasons (cowboy hats and horses?) everyone naturally thinks of this as a western, which, unfortunately brings up comparisons to great examples of the genre which bear no resemblance whatsoever and takes us down the wrong trail. To the extent that this movie invites comparisons to the greatest westerns ever made, the whole project was ill-conceived.
Even so, I wouldn't classify "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid" a western any more than I would call "Some Like It Hot" a gangster film. In fact, we should be looking at "Some Like It Hot" and other comic chase movies for comparisons to "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid," and not "The Wild Bunch" or "High Noon" or "The Searchers."
I am so with you on this. I just went through and read all the Rex Reed-wannabes and their negative comments. I'm usually very polite on these boards, but I cannot abide a slight to the movie I'd choose to have if I were shipwrecked on an desert island (with a generator and DVD player, if no WiFi.) The dialogue is snappy, the acting is superb from the leads to the supporting players, the production is innovative, and NOBODY IS EXPECTED TO THINK IT IS A SERIOUS WESTERN!!!!! It's in a class by itself.
sharePeople on here tend to love to rate things low. An 8.2 is an impressive score on this site. Anything at a 7 or above is actually a high ranking.
shareIt's a serious western but, it's not on the nose. It's about two men "out of time" who refuse to accept the reality that the world is changing around them. They're always looking for the horizon and adventure heck, by the end of the film i doubt they even need the money, they're just stuck in one way of livin'
The ending really seals the deal as, it is uncompromising and also puts a bow on their naivete about what is going on around them, quite literally, in the finales case.
Great film
About 7.5 is right. Way too many people give 9 or 10 stars for anything they like at all. As much as I enjoyed this film, it's not even close to something like 'High Noon', which only got an 8 itself. Today, every piece of crap with lots of CGI gets a 9 or 10 by the kiddies watching it.
shareToday, every piece of crap with lots of CGI gets a 9 or 10 by the kiddies watching it.
Various filters are applied to the raw data in order to eliminate and reduce attempts at vote stuffing by people more interested in changing the current rating of a movie than giving their true opinion of it.
Data:
8, 9, 10: 73.3% of 150,664 users
4,5,6,7: 25.3% of voters
1,2,3: 1.5% of voters
17.4% of voters gave it a 10.
Ranked # 184 in the Top 250 Movies
Other movies rated 8.1:
The Big Lebowski
The Deer Hunter
Fargo
Cool Hand Luke
Finding Nemo
The Thing (1982)
No Country for Old Men
It Happened One Night
Nights of Cabiria
The Maltese Falcon
Spotlight
The Wages of Fear
Network
Mad Max: Fury Road
Stand By Me
The 400 Blows
Lots of others.