Metacritic reviews

It’s quite good.

Slightly lacking in tension but with a striking performance from Marlon Brando.

On first release, Arthur Penn's 1976 western found itself derided as an addled, self-indulgent folly. Today, its quieter passages resonate more satisfyingly, while its lunatic take on a decadent, dying frontier seems oddly appropriate.

It's one of the few truly major Westerns of the '70s, with a very clear vision of the historical role played by fear and violence in the taming of the wilderness.

Missouri Breaks begins as a ramshackle comedy and ends as a dour tragedy about the death of the old west with Brando serving as its singularly warped Angel of Death.

A beautiful, gleefully weird vanity project that never quite coheres.

The film conveys a fine sense of place and period, of weather and mood and the precariousness of life, which are things that Mr. Nicholson responds to as an actor. Yet the plot, along with Mr. Brando, keeps intruding and throwing things out of balance.

The whole thing, script, acting, and especially Penn's heavy-handed direction, is bizarre. Yet there's a perverse joy in watching Brando and Nicholson try to compete with each other in mugging, switching accents, and mannerisms that could only be found elsewhere in institutions like the Bellevue Insane Asylum.

The trouble with The Missouri Breaks is that one is seriously drawn to it on its upfront elements, but leaves with a depressing sense of waste. As a film achievement it’s corned beef and ham hash.

It's a western, of sorts, and for the first half it's a lot of fun. But then things fall apart, and the film becomes fatally episodic.