Sam Peckinpah's Convoy is not merely a bad movie but a terrible movie. Anyone can make a bad movie—only a misguided talent can manage to be terrible. And there is visible talent, even in Convoy—particularly when men and machines are set into motion and smashed with an exquisite exuberance, as if visible matter were being transported to a realm beyond good and evil for the eternal edification of the naked eye.

But, then, the cardboard characterizations and comic-strip contrivances bring Convoy back down to earth with all the other infantile junk flicks of the late '70s. There is now no doubt that its director is scrambling for survival, taking whatever the traffic will bear. Never before has a Peckinpah film been so devoid of death and pain and even stress….

[Never before] has Peckinpah seemed so nakedly Russian as a visual rhetorician. This is where...