This 1966 film was eclipsed in many people's minds by The Wild Bunch three years later, but it's a good, solid job, and with Burt Lancaster, Lee Marvin, Robert Ryan, and Woody Strode, how could you miss?
75
TV Guide Magazine
TV Guide Magazine
A truly adventuresome, action-filled film that is played more for thrills than for conveying a story, The Professionals offers a field day for Lancaster, Ryan, Marvin, and Strode.
Exciting explosive sequences, good overall pacing and acting overcome a sometimes thin script.
60
Time Out
Time Out
Brooks could certainly write a line and direct action, but his taut and disillusioned yarn of American mercenaries intruding into the Mexican revolution to "rescue" Cardinale had only a couple of years in critical favour before it was comprehensively eclipsed by Peckinpah's ostensibly similar The Wild Bunch.
The scenery provided for this picture is clearly more profound than the script, and the sense of magnitude in the environment more engrossing than that in the plot.