Metacritic reviews

Devane gives a performance of anguished depth, the final carnage is spectacular and it's a time capsule of a movie.

William Devane's performance – as Major Charles Rane, a former POW who sees his family get killed by hoodlums – remains magnetic: stoic and unhinged.

At times deeply insightful, at others wholly crass, Rolling Thunder is a fascinating curio, the meeting point between realism and exploitation.

While Rolling Thunder suffers from Schrader's predictable obsessions with masculine ritual and gunplay, Devane and Jones enhance the material with their nuanced, sensitive portrayals of men who have lost their souls in another land.

Essentially a liberal vigilante film that’s rife with all the contradictions that description implies, Rolling Thunder has a pared, weirdly principled grace that still packs a punch.

Performances are made crystalline through a sixth sense for camera placement and curt cutting from director John Flynn, whose 2007 passing was little noted, though his no-BS way of laying down a story is a rare commodity in any era.

Rolling Thunder is a bloody, nasty, complicated action movie for a bloody, nasty, complicated moment in American history.

If you can forgive the cardboard villains and suspicious editing, there is plenty here to hold your interest.

The movie has some good things, but in the way it has been directed by John Flynn it moves so easily and sort of foolishly toward its violent climax that all the tension within Charlie has long since escaped the film.

Excellent cast performs well, but not well enough and Paul Schrader's story is strong, but not strong enough. In sum, it neither rolls nor thunders.