A true gritty western that surprised me in how much I enjoyed this given that I am not the most excited for the western genre. But this one is a real gem.

A true gritty western that surprised me in how much I enjoyed this given that I am not the most excited for the western genre. But this one is a real gem.

Young men evading a war they never asked to fight, only for the rest of the world to turn them into killers anyway. Virtually unheard of for me until recently, found myself rather immediately taken by Bad Company. Uses the West as a not-so-quiet allegory for the draft dodging and the cultural resistance to America’s presence in Vietnam and the widening continental drift between the varying generations of the country in the face of such bloodshed. Feels like one of those films that could’ve only really happened within the decade in which it released, aching with the rage and the aimless existentialism of the damage left behind by the “Greatest Generation”. I wasn’t sure what kind of film that Robert Benton was making based upon the early goings and I can’t lie to you and say that the initial concept of Jeff Bridges leading a ragtag group of kids who want to be outlaws didn’t seem a little humdrum to me initially. What I got instead was a monstrously brutal morality tale. An unflinchingly pious, Christian boy evading the draft finding himself falling in with this group of runaways and finding himself becoming colder than almost all of them. The way the film positions a very young Jeff Bridges as this charismatic cult of personality type, luring these boys along with promises of fortune and glory against Barry Brown, a fascinating young actor who died before he was even thirty, as this kid who’s trying his damndest to cling to his morals and to his convictions was genuinely fascinating. It’s so cool to see that Bridges has been an incredible actor since the literal beginning, twenty three years old and already following up his first Oscar nom with a role that requires him to walk a fine line between being so charismatic that you can understand why the boys all rally around him and also being an out and out scoundrel who bares all the blame for what ultimately happens to them. Brown fascinates me as an actor who I’ve never heard of before now, with an incredibly short filmography, but you can sense an almost Chalamet-as-Paul-Atreides type of hardening of his heart across the runtime. The guntoting, hardened killer is not the same kid that didn’t even want to witness their attempt at robbing a stagecoach and it’s the world that brings it out of him. That’s kind of the larger motif of the whole film, though. When the two of them first meet and then he becomes initiated into Bridges’ gang of would-be outlaws, I didn’t expect that I’d see one of them (a literal ten year old) explicitly and graphically get his head blown off for stealing a pie off a window. I didn’t expect that two more of them, older boys but still boys, would be strung and left hanging on a tree. The way in which the film doesn’t compromise for anybody along the way was a brutal shock to the senses, as was the way it shows how utterly unprepared any of them are for what they’re setting out to do. Bridges’ harsh tirade about how none of them can even skin a rabbit tells you everything you need to know and, even if you don’t quite guess the depths to which it will sink, makes it clear that none of this is going to end well. Bad Company avoids a lot of the usual fantastic aspects that the Western genre would apply to something like this. Hell, even when he was starting to engage in some of the harder aspects of 1970s American cinema, John Wayne had a salty as hell, gritty movie come out this exact same year that still didn’t have the sharp teeth that this one had. The boys aren’t some hardened killers. They’re just kids. And they’re handled like real, vicious criminals would handle kids. Bridges and Brown only become what hunts them because they find it within themselves, after everything has been ripped away from them. The God of 1970s cinematography Gordon Willis (the same year he shot the fucking Godfather) paints a version of the West that is cold and barren and empty. It’s picturesque but in a way that’s different from what you’d expect from any Western from around this time. It has a distant, grayed look about it, like you’re finding something that’s sat in a vault for fifty years and has the age to prove it. There’s a sobering feeling about it that reminds me of what Scorsese tapped into much later, using a time period in our history that a lot of film has used to considerable romantic effect and running it through a grinder, focusing on the mangled remains that are left and examining it for what it was. Although it’s not without some momentary coming-of-age musings and amusement (there’s a great scene where the boys go back and forth about whether they wanna partake in a little whorin’) and it certainly takes just enough time to endear all of its cast to you before it gets particularly brutal, there’s no real preparing for how cold and remorseless it becomes. America is a hard, vicious country that offers no real safety or retreat while a war wages across it. Even if you’re on the run, wolves still roam the plains.

Young men evading a war they never asked to fight, only for the rest of the world to turn them into killers anyway. Virtually unheard of for me until recently, found myself rather immediately taken by Bad Company. Uses the West as a not-so-quiet allegory for the draft dodging and the cultural resistance to America’s presence in Vietnam and the widening continental drift between the varying generations of the country in the face of such bloodshed. Feels like one of those films that could’ve only really happened within the decade in which it released, aching with the rage and the aimless existentialism of the damage left behind by the “Greatest Generation”. I wasn’t sure what kind of film that Robert Benton was making based upon the early goings and I can’t lie to you and say that the initial concept of Jeff Bridges leading a ragtag group of kids who want to be outlaws didn’t seem a little humdrum to me initially. What I got instead was a monstrously brutal morality tale. An unflinchingly pious, Christian boy evading the draft finding himself falling in with this group of runaways and finding himself becoming colder than almost all of them. The way the film positions a very young Jeff Bridges as this charismatic cult of personality type, luring these boys along with promises of fortune and glory against Barry Brown, a fascinating young actor who died before he was even thirty, as this kid who’s trying his damndest to cling to his morals and to his convictions was genuinely fascinating. It’s so cool to see that Bridges has been an incredible actor since the literal beginning, twenty three years old and already following up his first Oscar nom with a role that requires him to walk a fine line between being so charismatic that you can understand why the boys all rally around him and also being an out and out scoundrel who bares all the blame for what ultimately happens to them. Brown fascinates me as an actor who I’ve never heard of before now, with an incredibly short filmography, but you can sense an almost Chalamet-as-Paul-Atreides type of hardening of his heart across the runtime. The guntoting, hardened killer is not the same kid that didn’t even want to witness their attempt at robbing a stagecoach and it’s the world that brings it out of him. That’s kind of the larger motif of the whole film, though. When the two of them first meet and then he becomes initiated into Bridges’ gang of would-be outlaws, I didn’t expect that I’d see one of them (a literal ten year old) explicitly and graphically get his head blown off for stealing a pie off a window. I didn’t expect that two more of them, older boys but still boys, would be strung and left hanging on a tree. The way in which the film doesn’t compromise for anybody along the way was a brutal shock to the senses, as was the way it shows how utterly unprepared any of them are for what they’re setting out to do. Bridges’ harsh tirade about how none of them can even skin a rabbit tells you everything you need to know and, even if you don’t quite guess the depths to which it will sink, makes it clear that none of this is going to end well. Bad Company avoids a lot of the usual fantastic aspects that the Western genre would apply to something like this. Hell, even when he was starting to engage in some of the harder aspects of 1970s American cinema, John Wayne had a salty as hell, gritty movie come out this exact same year that still didn’t have the sharp teeth that this one had. The boys aren’t some hardened killers. They’re just kids. And they’re handled like real, vicious criminals would handle kids. Bridges and Brown only become what hunts them because they find it within themselves, after everything has been ripped away from them. The God of 1970s cinematography Gordon Willis (the same year he shot the fucking Godfather) paints a version of the West that is cold and barren and empty. It’s picturesque but in a way that’s different from what you’d expect from any Western from around this time. It has a distant, grayed look about it, like you’re finding something that’s sat in a vault for fifty years and has the age to prove it. There’s a sobering feeling about it that reminds me of what Scorsese tapped into much later, using a time period in our history that a lot of film has used to considerable romantic effect and running it through a grinder, focusing on the mangled remains that are left and examining it for what it was. Although it’s not without some momentary coming-of-age musings and amusement (there’s a great scene where the boys go back and forth about whether they wanna partake in a little whorin’) and it certainly takes just enough time to endear all of its cast to you before it gets particularly brutal, there’s no real preparing for how cold and remorseless it becomes. America is a hard, vicious country that offers no real safety or retreat while a war wages across it. Even if you’re on the run, wolves still roam the plains.

Which gives you the better odds of survival in the 1860’s: Civil War soldier or bank robber? A young Jeff Bridges continues to shed his Disney persona with another sociopathic dirtbag role. Pretty good pedigree behind the camera with director Robert Benton, writer David Newman, and shot by Gordon Willis - maybe best known for The Godfather movies, but I also love his work on Pennies from Heaven.

Which gives you the better odds of survival in the 1860’s: Civil War soldier or bank robber? A young Jeff Bridges continues to shed his Disney persona with another sociopathic dirtbag role. Pretty good pedigree behind the camera with director Robert Benton, writer David Newman, and shot by Gordon Willis - maybe best known for The Godfather movies, but I also love his work on Pennies from Heaven.

Since I was around 6 I’ve wanted to watch this movie, so yeah quite a while. It may seem like a very random movie to want to watch and it is, however there’s a reason. Having been a big movie fan since the day I was born due to my dad also being one, I often looked through my dads movie books. One especially I loved “reading through”; 501 must see movies (2004? edition). Being a big western fan even back then, the western section of the book was probably the one I most often looked through. In that section Bad Company was included as one of the movies accompanied with some text and an image. Since the book was in english and I was a little young kid, I obviously couldn’t read the text and I didn’t care either, but I could look at the image and boy did I. I’m not sure what caught my attention about the image as it’s not particularly exciting, just some dirty looking boys standing around, one of them with a gun. Nevertheless something about that image excited me. I’d often pretend to act out the events of the movie based solely on that single image. So fair to say I managed to create many storylines all based around that image.

Growing Older I kind of forgot about the image, however occasionally I’d revisit the book and my excitement for that movie would come back. Eventually I learned what it was actually about, and which actors starred in it, who the director was and so on, but I never watched it. Maybe I was too scared to watch it, having built so many ideas in my head, but the point is I never did even though I really really wanted to. Before watching it today it was perhaps the movie I’ve been excited to watch for the longest time. So I’m glad I was finally pushed to watch it ! Because it was GOOD.

It was never gonna be what I had played out in my head all those years ago, so of course I’d have to level my expectations somewhat, because despite having a long relationship with this movie, I didn’t really know much about it. The story about young boys joining together, feeling overwhelmed by society and war is as old as ever. It’s an endearing tale watching the outcasts bond together and try to make it on their own and I liked the way this movie went about it. The characters are all fun together, each putting on a tough front to hide the fact that they are just young boys with no real idea what they’re doing. Some are more successful at keeping this tough front than others, but no one can keep it up forever. A scene I liked in particular, was when Two of the boys decided to leave our main characters behind. The way the boys look so uncomfortable holding the gun almost afraid to use it and the juvenile stone throwing at the end of the scene, perfectly show that these boys are in over their head and nowhere near mature enough to handle their current situation.

It's shot gorgeously by Gordon Willis, most famous for his work on The Godfather movies. The way he captures the west was so unique and wonderful to see. So big and empty. Colorless and brown. Despite its extreme brown color, the movie never looks dull, it just feels cold and lifeless in a way that adds to the movie. The nature surrounding these boys is harsh and empty and not somewhere to live. Together with Harvey Schmidt’s wonderful but simple piano score, the movie really accomplished an atmosphere unlike any other western. Much more toned down, realistic, barren and cold. Though I must say, while I loved the piano score, I felt it couldn’t quite keep up with some of the more exciting scenes in the movie, like the forest shootout near the end.

The performances are probably my favorite part of the movie though. Bridges has always been someone who I’ve been a big fan of and here he gives another great performance. He’s charismatic at the right moments, but also juvenile or hot headed at others. His character was to me the most interesting. Though obviously caring for the other boys, as apparent with him making sure Drew keeps his watch, yet he always puts himself first and he’s far too immature to have the responsibility of others at hand. While I loved Bridges and his character, Barry Brown as the main character might’ve given my favorite performance. He’s a great lead and was a joy to watch, always bringing some kinda misguided hope to the movie, which worked wonderfully for his character. I was therefore extremely sad to hear that he took his own life at the young age of 27.

Overall I thought the movie was a wonderful depiction of a different west than we are used to. All elements of the movie work together perfectly to craft an underrated little western. I liked the ending, with Drew staying with Jake, fully aware of his life and with the possibility of a more sensible life right there. Despite not being perfect their friendship was key to this movie and obviously to the characters as they finally found someone who gets them and choosing to stick with each other instead of facing a life and society they don’t want. It’s an immature decision on both their parts no doubt but that’s what they are and it felt a fitting end for the characters. Good movie

Since I was around 6 I’ve wanted to watch this movie, so yeah quite a while. It may seem like a very random movie to want to watch and it is, however there’s a reason. Having been a big movie fan since the day I was born due to my dad also being one, I often looked through my dads movie books. One especially I loved “reading through”; 501 must see movies (2004? edition). Being a big western fan even back then, the western section of the book was probably the one I most often looked through. In that section Bad Company was included as one of the movies accompanied with some text and an image. Since the book was in english and I was a little young kid, I obviously couldn’t read the text and I didn’t care either, but I could look at the image and boy did I. I’m not sure what caught my attention about the image as it’s not particularly exciting, just some dirty looking boys standing around, one of them with a gun. Nevertheless something about that image excited me. I’d often pretend to act out the events of the movie based solely on that single image. So fair to say I managed to create many storylines all based around that image.

Growing Older I kind of forgot about the image, however occasionally I’d revisit the book and my excitement for that movie would come back. Eventually I learned what it was actually about, and which actors starred in it, who the director was and so on, but I never watched it. Maybe I was too scared to watch it, having built so many ideas in my head, but the point is I never did even though I really really wanted to. Before watching it today it was perhaps the movie I’ve been excited to watch for the longest time. So I’m glad I was finally pushed to watch it ! Because it was GOOD.

It was never gonna be what I had played out in my head all those years ago, so of course I’d have to level my expectations somewhat, because despite having a long relationship with this movie, I didn’t really know much about it. The story about young boys joining together, feeling overwhelmed by society and war is as old as ever. It’s an endearing tale watching the outcasts bond together and try to make it on their own and I liked the way this movie went about it. The characters are all fun together, each putting on a tough front to hide the fact that they are just young boys with no real idea what they’re doing. Some are more successful at keeping this tough front than others, but no one can keep it up forever. A scene I liked in particular, was when Two of the boys decided to leave our main characters behind. The way the boys look so uncomfortable holding the gun almost afraid to use it and the juvenile stone throwing at the end of the scene, perfectly show that these boys are in over their head and nowhere near mature enough to handle their current situation.

It's shot gorgeously by Gordon Willis, most famous for his work on The Godfather movies. The way he captures the west was so unique and wonderful to see. So big and empty. Colorless and brown. Despite its extreme brown color, the movie never looks dull, it just feels cold and lifeless in a way that adds to the movie. The nature surrounding these boys is harsh and empty and not somewhere to live. Together with Harvey Schmidt’s wonderful but simple piano score, the movie really accomplished an atmosphere unlike any other western. Much more toned down, realistic, barren and cold. Though I must say, while I loved the piano score, I felt it couldn’t quite keep up with some of the more exciting scenes in the movie, like the forest shootout near the end.

The performances are probably my favorite part of the movie though. Bridges has always been someone who I’ve been a big fan of and here he gives another great performance. He’s charismatic at the right moments, but also juvenile or hot headed at others. His character was to me the most interesting. Though obviously caring for the other boys, as apparent with him making sure Drew keeps his watch, yet he always puts himself first and he’s far too immature to have the responsibility of others at hand. While I loved Bridges and his character, Barry Brown as the main character might’ve given my favorite performance. He’s a great lead and was a joy to watch, always bringing some kinda misguided hope to the movie, which worked wonderfully for his character. I was therefore extremely sad to hear that he took his own life at the young age of 27.

Overall I thought the movie was a wonderful depiction of a different west than we are used to. All elements of the movie work together perfectly to craft an underrated little western. I liked the ending, with Drew staying with Jake, fully aware of his life and with the possibility of a more sensible life right there. Despite not being perfect their friendship was key to this movie and obviously to the characters as they finally found someone who gets them and choosing to stick with each other instead of facing a life and society they don’t want. It’s an immature decision on both their parts no doubt but that’s what they are and it felt a fitting end for the characters. Good movie

The majority of the is the mundane adventures of entitled pre-pubescent incels in the old west stamping their feet and tryna swing their dicks as they dodge the draft. Theyre all total assholes.
I think it woulda been better if theyd all been the same age cuz jeff bridges seems of an age that he’d be a little smarter, and its super off balance. Or at least if they’d all been a little more likeable. 
It gets better once the reality of the situation sets in. But its very plodding. The scenery looks the same the whole time. They even get robbed by the SAME people and act like theyve never met before. 
I wish they had been more charismatic from the beginning because I’d love for this to have been an origin story for Jake and Drew that lead to a sequel when theyre grown up and real odd couple outlaws. 

“Ive been left to die on the praire, alone and friendless... weather good.”

The majority of the is the mundane adventures of entitled pre-pubescent incels in the old west stamping their feet and tryna swing their dicks as they dodge the draft. Theyre all total assholes.
I think it woulda been better if theyd all been the same age cuz jeff bridges seems of an age that he’d be a little smarter, and its super off balance. Or at least if they’d all been a little more likeable. 
It gets better once the reality of the situation sets in. But its very plodding. The scenery looks the same the whole time. They even get robbed by the SAME people and act like theyve never met before. 
I wish they had been more charismatic from the beginning because I’d love for this to have been an origin story for Jake and Drew that lead to a sequel when theyre grown up and real odd couple outlaws. 

“Ive been left to die on the praire, alone and friendless... weather good.”