Rating: PG
Genres:
Drama
Western
Release Date: 06/04/2002
SubTitles: English
Dubbed: English
Sound: DD1
Run Time: 92 min
Flags: Mild Violence, Adult Situations, Questionable for Children, Adult Language
Distributor/Studio: Paramount
Set during the Civil War,
Bad Company stars
Barry Brown as a Northern boy,
Drew Dixon, who heads West to avoid getting drafted. He falls under the spell of
Jake Rumsey (
Jeff Bridges), an easygoing young con artist.
Drew joins
Jake's gang of boy bandits, who live by their wits and try to avoid confrontation with adult criminals like
Big Joe (
David Huddleston). It is
Drew who must eventually save
Jake from hanging, even though he realizes that his intervention could lead to his own execution.
~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
Making his assured directorial debut with an intelligently entertaining genre piece,
Robert Benton takes a decidedly unsentimental view of the frontier myths of male bonding and opportunity for the
Western Bad Company (1972). Set during the Civil War,
Benton and
Bonnie and Clyde (1967) collaborator
David Newman's screenplay subtly evokes the Vietnam era in its focus on two young draft dodgers, pious
Barry Brown and larcenous
Jeff Bridges. Rather than a place of freedom and opportunity, the West they find is an unglamorous prairie wasteland of petty thieves, physical threats, rough justice, and shifting loyalties.
Benton maintains a low-key, thoughtful tone occasionally leavened by bits of humor, while
Gordon Willis' expressive, autumnal cinematography and
Harvey Schmidt's piano score quietly underline the evolution of
Brown's upstanding values as he confronts the West's moral relativity. Though not as well-known as such other contemporary
revisionist Westerns as
The Wild Bunch (1969) and
Little Big Man (1970),
Bad Company stands as another engaging elegy to the ultimate American myth.
~ Lucia Bozzola, All Movie Guide
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