10 "Controversial" Movies That Didn't Deserve All The Hype

6. The Wild Bunch

The controversy: At the end of Sam Peckinpah's elegiac western masterwork The Wild Bunch, his band of heroes go out in a blaze of glory, taking down dozens of Mexican soldiers in a hail of machine gun bullets and copious blood. According to some critics, the sequence is an endorsement of movie violence. The reality: Although that final scene is indeed a bloodbath, you can see a lot worse from any modern horror. What's more, the violence is deliberately cartoonish and, rather than being gratuitous, it serves a purpose. You see, Peckinpah noticed how violence was broadcast nightly on American television screens, with the Vietnam War still raging and airing on the news at the time. The point of Peckinpah's film was to turn audiences off the violence they were witnessing every day, by extending it "so that it's not fun anymore... It's ugly, brutalising, and bloody awful". If the film has a reputation for glorifying violence, then it's just because a minority misread what Peckinpah was going for in the first place.