Bosley Crowther, the New York Times film critic then, having failed to see the point of "Bonnie and Clyde," wrote that it was just "another indulgence of a restless and reckless taste, and an embarrassing addition to an excess of violence on the screen".
There are some wonderful visual moments, an excess of violence (most of it inflicted by Mr. Bock's hysterical priest upon the film's one female character) and a few good jokes, at least in translation, including the wild-eyed priest announcing, "My calling is calling," before rushing off to murder the automaton.
Critics accuse Mann of fetishising weapons, of glorifying in the technical excesses of violence.
The foundations also view themselves as bulwarks against the excesses of violence, financing only those groups that support nonviolent demonstrations.
I've recounted how fortunate I felt to be wearing white cotton gloves when handling, a few years ago, the memoir written by Korah Halcomb Wills, an English "settler" on the Queensland frontier where perhaps the worst excesses of violence against Indigenous people happened in the 19th and 20th centuries.
But it is also the crucible of the country's worst excesses of violence, criminality and inequality.
The answer is that the tackle, nasty though it was, came nowhere near to being in excess of the violence expected (and agreed to) in a game of football.
Its real problem isn't an excess or celebration of violence, but, simply, a lack of imagination; it's bad — and if its director, Matthew Vaughn, wanted it to be bad as in "bad boys and girls," or even "bad trip," or "bad news," what he produced was just "a bad time".
Occasional outcries from the outraged public are carefully filtered through media outlets and sometimes pressure politicians to legislate and regulate the excesses of unbounded violence, as in the case of the registration of firearms in Canada and in the EU.
It also probably curbed the excesses of Viking violence and led to a more settled society in northern Scotland.
Even as thousands were brutally killed and the excesses of his violence raged out of control (he famously once blew up a commercial airliner in an attempt to kill one man) Pablo was still a hero to the poor and dispossessed of Medellin society.
