Owen Gleiberman of "Entertainment Weekly" gave "Bound By Honor" a B-, falling on the high end of the film spectrum. He states ""Bound By Honor" comes fully alive when it moves behind bars. There's an exploitative thrill built into the genre…" Gleiberman was more interested in the second half of the film once Miklo was in jail running La Onda. Vincent Canby of "The New York Times" wrote "The film is big and long, passionate and flat. It's full of heroic and tragic incident, but skimpy about the details of quotidian lives." Canby exalts some of the characters in the film one in particular, Enrique Castillo. Although Vincent Canby does not give an official rating for the film, he concludes "Though it's not the epic it means to be, it is not a failure."