The film isn't dreadful: it is just generally disappointing.
Comment
10/26/06
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All The King's Men (2006)
10
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Reviews Counted:41
Fresh:4
Rotten:37
Average Rating:4.1/10
Consensus: With its star-studded cast and hallowed source material (the novel of the same name won the Pulitzer Prize, and the 1949 original film took home a best picture Oscar), All the King's Men has the pedigree of a prestige picture. Don't be fooled. With a scenery-chewing performance from Sean Penn, an absence of political insight, and an overall lack of narrative cohesiveness, Men gives Oscar bait a bad name.
Theatrical Release:2006
Box Office: $7,221,458
Synopsis: Based on Robert Penn Warren's 1946 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, All the King's Men tells the story of an idealist's rise to power in the world of Louisiana politics and the corruption that leads... [More]
Starring: Sean Penn, Jude Law, Patricia Clarkson, Kate Winslet
Director: Steven Zallian
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Reviews for All The King's Men
Top CriticThe director can’t seem to find a natural rhythm for the movie -- it’s portentous and vague at the same time.
09/25/06
Top CriticAll the King's Men was suspended in editing limbo for nearly a year, and the final result only makes the mind reel at what it could have been carved from.
09/22/06
Top CriticIt has a labored feel. The editing is choppy, allowing little of the film to flow naturally.
09/22/06
Top CriticCrawford showed us a man who sold his soul to do good and then, soulless, found himself incapable of resisting evil; Penn gives us a smart actor tearing into an awards-baiting role.
09/22/06
Top Critic[It] isn't going to win any awards for Law, a frantically hamming Penn or anyone else involved.
09/22/06
Top CriticFailures on the scale of writer-director Steven Zaillian's All the King's Men are as rare as falling sequoias, and they make a noise even if no one's in the woods to hear them.
09/22/06
Top CriticIt's too full of itself; it's too convinced of its own value to be much of any to audiences.
09/22/06
Top CriticSean Penn's work here is so mesmerizing, so intense, so guaranteed to put him front and centre when Oscar reads out the nominees, as to almost obscure the multiple failings of the misguided movie around it.
09/22/06
Top CriticUngainly and bloated with an unearned sense of self-importance, All the King's Men is nevertheless worth watching for Sean Penn's mesmerizing performance as a corrupt politician who exults in his own dirty ways.
09/22/06
Top CriticAll the King's Men is obviously a movie that has been so rejiggered and downsized, in length and intelligence, that its guiding principles have been sacrificed to the marketplace -- a fate not unlike that of its blustery antihero.
09/22/06
Top CriticInstead of bringing this story to bustling, brilliant life, Zaillian and company make it feel as if it belongs behind a glass case in some museum.
09/22/06
Top CriticNo use getting sore that one art form trumps another. It's not the first time an outstanding book became a ponderous film.
09/22/06
Top CriticWatching All the King's Men's downward tumble makes for perverse fun, with the emphasis on perverse.
09/22/06
Top CriticAll the King's Men is miscast. The soundtrack is awful. The storyline is confusing. The cinematography is too slick and pretty, when we should be bathed in a sultry, sweaty, sticky, gritty atmosphere.
09/22/06
Top CriticThe unfocused story is so bereft of any clear sense of period or location that the political melodrama sometimes seems to be taking place inside a cigar box.
09/22/06
Top CriticAll the King's Men is a big, important awards-season special with one glaring problem: It doesn't have anything urgent or even interesting to say.
09/22/06
Top CriticIn the end this murky remake functions mainly as a plain-wrapper setting for a fancy piece of acting that gets lost in a void. Who needs it? Who needed it in the first place?
09/21/06
Top CriticWe never quite know what Willie Stark does stand for, aside from the fact that we're repeatedly told he's a man of the people. Penn's performance has the opacity of solid brick.
09/21/06
Top CriticAll the King's Men aspires to be a profound commentary on political corruption, but it's more of a vehicle for scenery-chewing by Sean Penn.
09/21/06
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