There are lots of wrecks in Sam Peckinpah's penultimate film Convoy—an 18-wheeler overturning while taking a hard turn, a car jumping an embankment and crashing through the roof of a barn, two 18-wheelers crushing a police car between them—but there is no wreck on-screen that quite matches the wreck that Peckinpah himself had become at that point in his career. Having spent the previous decade and a half battling with every producer with whom he worked, courting controversy with his brutal-poetic depictions of violence, alienating most of his friends and collaborators with his erratic and paranoid behavior, and drinking and drugging himself into oblivion, Peckinpah was a pale shadow of the formidable filmmaker he had been in the late 1960s and early '70s. His name still carried enough weight that EMI, the British production company that bought the rights to C.W. McCall's chart-topping novelty song "Convoy," were willing to gamble on him, hoping that his instabilities would be outweighed by his cinematic brilliance. At the very least they ensured that they would get final cut and, regardless of what happened during the production, they could bill Convoy as "A Sam Peckinpah Film."

And, to some degree, Convoy is a Sam Peckinpah film, albeit one that he took primarily for the money and one that contains only flashes of what made works like Major Dundee (1964), The Wild Bunch (1969), and Straw Dogs (1971) so remarkable. Working from a shaggy script by B.W.L. Norton (More American Graffitti, Losin' It), Peckinpah sought to make a mountain out of a molehill, supercharging the film's flimsy, hollow premise with all of his favorite themes, notably old friends-turned-foes, fierce individuality versus the corrupt system, and the dying codes of honorable masculinity (see also Major Dundee, The Wild Bunch, and Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid [1973]). Much of that wound up on the cutting room floor after Peckinpah was unceremoniously removed during the editing phase, but shards still remain, enough to allow hard-core auteurists to tease out the Peckinpah-ness of any given moment.

The story concerns the titular convoy, which grows as the film goes on until it represents some kind of massive force of sheer willpower. Ostensibly a protest of sorts, the film is so oblique that no one really knows what the convoy is supposed to mean, least of all the characters leading it. The primary leader is Rubber Duck (Kris Kristofferson), a charismatic trucker who stands with two of his trucker buddies, Pig Pen (Burt Young) and Spider Mike (Franklyn Ajaye), against the corrupt sheriff "Dirty Lyle" Wallace (Ernest Borgnine), who, along with all the other law enforcement officers in the film, hates truckers ostensibly because they represent the kind of freedom they inherently want to oppress. There are a lot of fill-in-the-blanks throughout the film, including an odd exchange early on when Rubber Duck and Dirty Lyle confront each other and Rubber Duck tells him that there "aren't many of them left." Any of who left? The immediate thought is Vietnam veterans, although there were plenty of those in 1978. Peckinpah can only leave us to wonder.

Early in the film, Rubber Duck picks up a woman named Melissa (Ali MacGraw), who is first seen driving a convertible that she later has to sell when it breaks down. She catches a ride with Rubber Duck just before all hell breaks loose in a roadside diner when Dirty Lyle tries to arrest Spider Mike on trumped up charges of vagrancy. While Rubber Duck is no John Rambo, he and the others react just as defensively, turning the diner into a mini-war zone against Lyle and his deputies, who, after several minutes of slow-motion fisticuffs and general destruction of everything in sight, are left either knocked unconsciousness or tied to a bar stool with their own handcuffs. Melissa's presence in the film is as pointless as the convoy itself. Ali MacGraw, in her first film role in nearly five years, during which time she traded in her long locks for a cropped perm, has virtually no character to play; whatever chemistry she and Kris Kristofferson might have generated was cut from the film, leaving only bits and pieces of interactions that somehow justify a blossoming romance, which is decidedly not Peckinpah's strong suit. MacGraw had been crowned one of Hollywood's biggest stars after the smash success of Love Story (1970), and she had worked with Peckinpah previously on The Getaway (1972) opposite her then-husband Steve McQueen. Convoy is filled with Peckinpah regulars, including Kristofferson (Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid), Ernest Borgnine (The Wild Bunch), and Burt Young (The Killer Elite [1975]), which gives it a homecoming-throwback quality that jives with its studious lack of seriousness (attempts at political satire involving an opportunistic governor played by Seymour Cassel fall flat).

Unfortuately, the film's more enjoyable moments are constantly undercut with a spirit of cruelty that feels decidedly out of place. There have always been currents of abject meanness in Peckinpah's films, especially when it comes to sex, and as the films got worse over the final decade of his career, the meanness became more apparent and less defensibly, especially as it was shorn of meaningful thematic relevance. It is hard not to think of the casual cruelty of Al Lettieri's character in The Getaway kidnapping a married couple and then tying up the husband and forcing him to watch him have (apparently consensual, but maybe not) sex with his blonde-bimbo wife to the point that the poor guy hangs himself in the bathroom. There is no point to this subplot outside of its nastiness, and there is something similar in Convoy when Rubber Duck initially meets up with his girlfriend (Carrie Yates), a sad-eyed waitress with an abusive husband. Yates's character is so dejected, so downright pathetic with her slumped shoulders and desperation to please Rubber Duck that their scenes bring the whole movie down before it even gets started. A later joke in which she gets to show Lyle how obtuse he is via the lifting of a barstool seat offers only minor respite.

But, then there are moments scattered throughout that resonate with the kind of brutal beauty that all but defines Peckinpah at his best. Granted, they are few and far between, but when they work, they carry the weight of sheer visual poetry. I am thinking here specifically of a sequence in which a line of 18-wheelers cuts backcountry on an unpaved road, throwing up voluminous plumes of sand and dust that, in Peckinpah's exaggerated slow motion, take on lives of their own. And, while Peckinpah knows how to make us feel the bulk and power of all those massive trucks in motion, he fails to connect the visual majesty to anything substantiative or meaningful. While his producers clearly wanted him to make another Smokey and the Bandit (1977), he was trying to make The Wild Bunch on wheels, and the end result is a bastardized stew that is both and neither.

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