"A film about a man who doesn't want to run being chased by a man who doesn't want to catch him" is a much-noted synopsis regarding "Pat Garrett & Billy The Kid". You could also say it's a film starring actors who couldn't act directed by a director without direction.<br /><br />That may be unfair, ignoring as it does the sterling work of James Coburn, who plays the first half of the title pair. But Kris Kristofferson, as Billy, and Bob Dylan, as his pal "Alias", look very much like rock stars on holiday in a film that tries to be both elegiac and unsentimental and winds up slack.<br /><br />Of course, with Sam Peckinpah directing what amounted to his final western, "Pat Garrett" has its champions. It's about the death of the West, they say; a fair point, though not a fresh theme in Peckinpah's oeuvre. Or it's about the problem of a lawman upholding a corrupt law, though as with so many other things about this movie there's more subtext than text to deal with there.<br /><br />What "Pat Garrett" isn't is an exciting, visceral entertainment on par with any of Peckinpah's other major films. Even "Major Dundee", though rambling in its own right, has a bounce and energy this movie lacks. Too many tequila sunrises were adding up for this director, and though he still had bullets in his gun, he wasn't placing them as well as before.<br /><br />Take the scene many bring up in "Pat Garrett's" favor, when Slim Pickens and Katy Jurado face mortality on a riverbank to the strains of Dylan's "Knockin' On Heaven's Door". A great visual image, Jurado both crying and smiling against the dying sunlight, but neither Peckinpah nor the script by Rudy Wurlitzer do enough to prepare us for the scene, the aftermath of a silly-looking gunfight featuring Jurado's shotgun-wielding antics. We hadn't even met the couple ten minutes ago; so how wrapped up in their fates can we really be?<br /><br />Coburn makes for a superb boozy center, playing very much against his hipster image and giving the film a gravitas it sorely needs. "Comes an age in a man's life when he doesn't want to spend time thinking' about what comes next," he says, a contrast from the forever-young come-what-may Billy. As the commentators on the DVD Special Edition noted, there's a strange lack of incident involving Billy, a criminal we see committing no crime, except resisting arrest and one cattle robbery which goes awry. It's not exactly Kristofferson's fault he comes off as such a cipher; just that he doesn't do enough to fill the void with any kind of personality.<br /><br />Count me as one who prefers the 2005 Paul Seydor edit to the longer version released in 1988. Seydor's version lends a focus by tightening some rambling sections and restoring a useful episode involving Pat Garrett's wife. No doubt Peckinpah's 1973 release would have been definitive if he had been given enough time to craft it properly; the editing room was where his true genius emerged time and again. Yet one wonders how much blood and sweat it would have been worth given the dreary, inert material he seems to have shot here.<br /><br />The nice thing about "Pat Garrett", apart from the inspired visuals from John Coquillon, is the chance to revisit recognizable faces from Peckinpah's other films offering what would be for most of them a final bow. Some really shine, too, like R.G. Armstrong as a dangerously zealous deputy, Richard Bright as a surly member of the Kid's gang, and Donnie Fritts as another, more easy-going member. A rock musician in real life, Fritts could have taught Kristofferson and Dylan something about looking natural on screen.