Critic Reviews
81
Metascore
Universal Acclaim
positive
18(90%)
mixed
2(10%)
negative
0(0%)
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Metascore
100
McQueen is great in Bullitt, and the movie is great, because director Peter Yates understands the McQueen image and works within it. He winds up with about the best action movie of recent years.
100
Blessed with the fresh eyes of newly landed Englishman Yates (and genius cameraman William Fraker), the movie makes San Francisco fresh and alive, but also completely remakes and modernises the bleak, sleazy gangster demimonde in which Bullitt does his hunting.
100
It is simply one of the most exciting and intelligent action films in years, probably the best good-cop film we can expect to encounter.
100
Conflict between police sleuthing and political expediency is the essence of Bullitt, an extremely well-made crime melodrama [from Robert L. Pike's novel Mute Witness] filmed in Frisco. Steve McQueen delivers a very strong performance as a detective seeking a man whom Robert Vaughn, ambitious politico, would exploit for selfish motives. Good scripting and excellent direction by Peter Yates maintain deliberately low-key but mounting suspense.
100
Expert chase film, breathless and modern, that sent McQueen to the top of the box office heap. Bullitt is a return to the old, tough crime movies so expertly played by Bogart and Robinson, but made modern here by great technical advances and McQueen's taciturn, antihero stance. Yates's superb direction presents a fluid, always moving camera. All the performers are top-notch.
100
One of the cinema’s very best car-chase sequences – set amid the hilly, windy San Francisco streets – caps this quintessential Steve McQueen policier.
90
A terrific movie, just right for Steve McQueen—fast, well acted, written the way people talk.
88
The seminal police thriller is a prime example of McQueen's rising above his material. [12 Jun 2005, p.K1]
80
The plot, concerning the battle of wits between an honest cop and an ambitious politician for possession of the key witness in a Mafia exposé, is serviceable but nothing special. But the action sequences are brilliant, done without trickery in real locations (including a great car chase which spawned a thousand imitations) to lend an extraordinary sense of immediacy to the shenanigans and gunfights.
80
Yates (hired on the strength of his taut British crime flick Robbery) eschews fashionable camera gimmickry and facile psychiatry, and concentrates on telling a fast-paced story of decent San Francisco cop Steve McQueen doing his job. The set-pieces (the car chase, the airport shoot-out) are famous, but the film lives on through its tone of romantic realism. [23 Jan 2000, p.10]
