Avis Metacritic

Hill evokes the great westerns of the past—in particular "Shane" and "My Darling Clementine"— but his approach is essentially postmodern. Though Hickok is a hero from another century, his plight is thoroughly contemporary.

While Hill’s hallucinatory script — adapted from a novel and a play — is about the dangers of fostering your own myth, the movie fawns over its character’s legend rather than aiming for his murky reality.

This is a valiant but overcomplicated Western that aims to redraw the lines on Western mythology: with heroes as mere humans, and heroics as distortions of the truth.

The movie tries for poetry and elegy in its closing scenes, and we can see where it's headed, although it doesn't get there.

The film ultimately comes up short when it has to deal with Hickok as something other than a legend; Hill is hampered as usual by his fixation on iconography.

With “Geronimo,” an honorable effort to right some wrongs done the Apache warrior in past movies, [Hill] seemed stifled by his commitment to history. And in “Wild Bill,” which he wants us to see as a psychological profile of a legend’s final days, he can’t for the life of him let go of the legend.

Despite its authentic feel for things Western, Wild Bill misses the big picture.

In the early going "Wild Bill" looks interesting -- an audacious wallow in violence and Western legend. Then 20 minutes in, writer-director Walter Hill puts his cards on the table. It's a dead man's hand.

Opening with a wearying series of nasty and violent episodes attesting to Bill's predilection for solving problems by shooting at them, and his nearly comic indignation at having his hat touched (men have died at his hand for committing that transgression alone), the movie quickly establishes a pattern of bad decision-making on the part of the writer-director.

Like the opium dreams that its eponymous hero becomes addicted to, this fragmented, trigger-happy account of Wild Bill Hickok's final years feels like a bad trip through every cheap western knockoff you ever had to sit through.