Magazine articles about its making have outlined the problems: multiple script changes, wholesale reshooting. The tinkering appears to have eroded the film's basic core. It is now a series of audience-pleasing turns, with little sense of unity.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Jul 23, 2019

Redford and company have put a quirky twist on the material, investing it with a quasi-mystical aspect as well as some raw comedy.

| Nov 7, 2007

Fairly choked with good intentions, whimsy, touches of fantasy, and cardboard liberal stereotypes.

| Nov 7, 2007

Redford's film sustains a slow mood of simpatico amiability and photographs the landscape with moony or golden washes that are perhaps hard to dislike, but is slain by its adherence to an outdated populist mythology.

| Jun 24, 2006

The film is very big on sunsets and sunrises. It also has a touristy appreciation for all manner of things folkloric. What it doesn't have is dramatic coherence or backbone.

| Original Score: 2/5 | May 20, 2003

If Redford had left out a few of the waffling, undecided characters and drawn his dramatic lines more strongly, the film might have been a lot more powerful.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Jan 1, 2000

Corny, you bet. But that's to be admired in an old war horse on the last frontier.

| Jan 1, 2000

Redford and his crack cast of familiar gringos and less-familiar locals had an infectiously good time making it.

| Jan 1, 2000