Quartile rating: 6.5/10 · 1 rating
Trucker Rubber Duck and his buddies Pig Pen, Widow Woman and Spider Mike use their CB radios to warn one another of the presence of cops. But conniving Sheriff Wallace is hip to the truckers' tactics, and begins tricking the drivers through his own CB broadcasts. Facing constant harassment from the law, Rubber Duck and his pals use their radios to coordinate a vast convoy and rule the road.
Convoy is a loose, episodic road movie based on a novelty song, which gives it a certain freewheeling charm but very little narrative discipline. The plot is thin and meandering — more a series of set pieces than a coherent story, with motivations shifting arbitrarily toward a muddled political allegory. Kris Kristofferson is laconic to the point of inexpressiveness, and the ensemble cast is serviceable but undemanding. Sam Peckinpah's direction brings some visual energy and interesting staging of the vehicular chaos, and the wide highway cinematography has a dusty, sun-baked texture that fits the era well. Its novelty lies in being a genuine artifact of the CB radio/trucker counterculture craze of the late 1970s — a cultural time capsule with a loose anti-establishment spirit — though it's too shaggy to feel truly distinctive beyond that context. The ending is particularly weak, wavering between satire and sincerity in a way that satisfies neither, and the resolution feels unearned and abrupt.