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Reviews Counted:65
Fresh:21
Rotten:44
Average Rating:4.9/10
Consensus: Though ambitious, Good stumbles in the transition from stage to screen, and Mortensen's performance isn't enough to cover its flaws.
Theatrical Release:Dec 31, 2008 Limited
Synopsis: EASTERN PROMISES' Viggo Mortensen stars in this World-War-II-era drama as a professor who is reluctant to join the Nazi party. As anti-Semitic feelings grow, he is forced to choose between his... [More]
Starring: Viggo Mortensen, Jason Isaacs, Jodie Whittaker, Steven Mackintosh
Director: Vicente Amorim
Bears a superficial resemblance to "The Conformist" and "The Garden of the Finzi-Continis," with their sense of dreary complacency, oppressively museum-like spaces, and curiously drab natural settings, but ultimately "Good" is less evocative
A tale illustrating the banality of evil is as timely as ever but the execution is heavy-handed and even with location filming and elaborate sets it still feels very theatrical.
Ultimately Good, like its central figure, seems to lack the courage of its convictions.
A strong cast and good starting material doesn't manage to save this unsuccessful adaptation.
By all accounts, Taylor’s play was a more experimental piece than this film, in which the production values, like the acting, veer between the acceptable and the stodgy.
Not for the first time, great theatre makes for a merely adequate film.
It’s a thought-provoking theme, which is rather let down by a thoroughly unconvincingly turn from Mortensen.
To its credit, Good is at least a piece with something serious to say, with little of the meretricious responsibility-deflecting that The Reader dealt in.
We’re gearing up for a clunker of a climax involving musically gifted interns at the world’s sprucest concentration camp. Mortensen wears it well, but this feels like very old hat.
Good’s attempts to diagnose the cancerous spread of Nazi influence through Germany’s population in the mid-’30s is laudable, but despite Mortensen’s stoic talents Halder is just too hollow a character for this to be anything other than a vapid parable.
The point is how does a "good" man get seduced by evil¨? Thing is, the movie's so muted and keeps viewers at such arm's length, you cease to wonder.
It is a fine piece of acting from Mortensen, who portrays his character’s weakness superbly. But Good sometimes lacks pace and direction. On balance this is an intelligent and sensitive approach to a very dark era of history.
It may have been a good stage play: people say it was. But its author, the late C.P. Taylor, was not around to stop it becoming a lousy film.
Mortensen isn't bad, though he looks merely absent-minded rather than anguished.
The original play, once dubbed one of the 100 best of the century, is fleshed out with skill by Amorim but somehow his film never comes fully to life. Even its melodramatic ending falls flat.
Despite strong performances and decent production design, Good lacks the emotional weight it needs to deliver the requisite punch. Disappointing.
Set in that weird film version of Nazi Germany full of RADA-trained Home Counties poshos, Good is, in a sense, an amazing achievement- it makes the Holocaust boring.
There's probably a great film to be made about the way ordinary Germans succumbed to the allure of Nazism – but this weakly directed film, adapted from CP Taylor's acclaimed 1981 stage play, isn't it.
This isn't gritty realism; it's a morality tale, and it's made with quiet passion and real power
Viggo Mortensen stars as Prof John Halder - far too handsome for such a part: in life, the bookish are usually ugly as sin, let's face facts.
December 15, 2008:
Trailer & Poster review 
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December 15, 2008:
Trailer & Poster review
More...
August 26, 2008:
Trailer Bulletin: Good
The trailer for "Good," Vicente Amorim's Viggo Mortensen-led adaptation of the long-running C.P. Taylor play about a man's hellish descent into the Nazi Party during World War... More...
September 12, 2007:
RT Talks Eastern Promises with David Cronenberg and Viggo Mortensen
The upcoming Eastern Promises marks the second collaboration between David Cronenberg and Viggo Mortensen since A History of Violence in 2006. A crime drama with an interest in... More...
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