YMMV / The War Wagon

• Adaptation Displacement: The movie is an exciting, well-remembered Western caper movie with a nuanced and likable cast of characters. The book is a fairly forgettable read with a much smaller fanbase and a blander cast of characters.
• Alternate Character Interpretation: Whether Chief Wild Horse double-crosses Taw to steal the gold or the food that is used to hide the gold is a bit ambiguous.
• Funny Moments:
  • The look on Lomax's face when he finds out that the hung-over Billy is the explosives expert for the heist is hilarious.
  • After Taw and Lomax shoot two Mooks, Lomax gloats about how his opponent hit the ground first, while Taw claims this is because the man he shot was taller.
• Magnificent Bastard: Taw Jackson plots to steal $500,000 in gold from the heavily guarded convoy of a man who had him wrongfully imprisoned. Taw forms a plan and recruits multiple accomplices while serving his sentence. Within days of his release he convinces a hated enemy to join him in his scheme and rescues an accomplice from a crowded outlaw camp through quick-thinking trickery. He shrewdly avoids raising any suspicions that he is planning a robbery or that Pierce's gunman is working with him. He is willing to use the local Kiowa Native Americans as Canon Fodder in his scheme, but pays them for their efforts and respects their noncombatants. Taw's plan to separate Pierce and most of his bodyguards by destroying a bridge, ambush the wagon with a log trap and smuggle the gold away in Pierce's own flour barrels almost succeeds, until the Kiowa betray him. Despite losing most of his loot, Taw is content with the fraction of it that he does manage to save and Pierce's death and lets his partners know about the money rather than pretend it was lost too.
• Moral Event Horizon: Wes is established as a particularly greedy jerk pretty quickly, but the reveal that he bought his much younger wife from her family when she was a teenager cements him as the Token Evil Teammate of Taw's crew.