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Regrettably, the film spends a great deal of time in detailing the not very illuminating background of everyone involved in the incident. (It does, how ever, offer Woods a chance to give a splendid performance as a psychopath —jaunty, furious, ingratiating, ignorant and intelligent in bewildering turns.) The film's deliberate piling up of superfluous minutiae tends to have a numbing effect even before the characters get down to the main business of the plot: the murder and its endless afterlife in court.
Here, too, Wambaugh continues to me ander. He is unable to solve the problem of compressing seven dull years into a coherent, suspenseful story, possibly because he, and Actor Savage, cannot find a way to turn Hettinger into a sympathetic person, or even an articulate one. The Onion Field is a serious and most uncompromising movie. It lacks, however, the sort of disciplined craft that might have made it a powerful and affecting one.
— Richard Schickel