Reception
Walker garnered predominantly negative reviews; Rita Kempley wrote, "it's gross as it is muddled as it is absurd", in her review for the Washington Post. Fellow Washington Post reviewer Desson Howe queered the "perplexing fusion of cartoon and docudrama ..." In his review for Newsweek, David Ansen wrote, "His scenes have no shape, his characters are stick figures, the wit is undergraduate and his soggy set pieces of slow-motion carnage are third-rate Peckinpah imitations." Jay Scott gave the film a positive review in the Globe and Mail: "Cox exposes the limitations of historical drama in Walker with a calculated disregard of its conventions." Vincent Canby also praised Cox's film in the New York Times: "Walker is witty, rather than laugh-out-loud funny. Without being solemn, it's deadly serious...Walker is something very rare in American movies these days. It has some nerve."
Director Alex Cox was never employed again by a major Hollywood studio, and his subsequent films have received only limited distribution in the United States. In a 2008 interview with The A.V. Club, Cox said, "Distribution is controlled by the studios, and I've been on the blacklist of the studios for the last 20 years ... The last movie I was asked to direct was The Running Man… which was actually quite a good film, I thought. I would have liked to have done The Running Man. It was just that Walker happened at the same time."
Read more about this topic: Walker (film)
Famous quotes containing the word reception:
“He’s leaving Germany by special request of the Nazi government. First he sends a dispatch about Danzig and how 10,000 German tourists are pouring into the city every day with butterfly nets in their hands and submachine guns in their knapsacks. They warn him right then. What does he do next? Goes to a reception at von Ribbentropf’s and keeps yelling for gefilte fish!”
—Billy Wilder (b. 1906)
“Satire is a sort of glass, wherein beholders do generally discover everybody’s face but their own; which is the chief reason for that kind of reception it meets in the world, and that so very few are offended with it.”
—Jonathan Swift (1667–1745)
“To aim to convert a man by miracles is a profanation of the soul. A true conversion, a true Christ, is now, as always, to be made by the reception of beautiful sentiments.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)