Apocalypto Reviews

It doesn't take long for the question to arise and to linger, unanswered, over a film that never offers an answer: Why in the world did anyone make this movie?

Full Review | Original Score: 0.5/4

Gibson's interest in human cruelty and human suffering does not make him unique among filmmakers. His preferred mixture of piety and viciousness, however, makes him uniquely suited to our post-Cecil B. DeMille age of cinematic mythmaking.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/4

... Gibson's directorial efforts have been fairly blood-soaked historical exercises -- and Apocalyto isn't just more of the same, it's entirely too much of the same. ... Apocalypto is a career-ending flop, and easily the worst movie of 2006.

Full Review | Original Score: 0/4

About the best that can be said for Mel Gibson's overblown indulgence in sadism is that at least it isn't anti-Semitic.

Full Review | Original Score: 1/4

You're not likely to forget the experience, but one can't help but wonder who would want to go through it in the first place.

Full Review | Original Score: C+

This is Gibson's bloodlust pure and unfiltered, and it's depressing to sit and watch him make the same film for the third time in a row.

Full Review | Original Score: D+

In spite of its high production values and higher pretensions, This is really just a gory matinee actionfest. Director Gibson needs a better writer than writer Gibson.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/10

What this thing turns out to be is a skimpy action flick.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5

Apocalypto is an exploitative, over-the-top, and nauseatingly pointless display of bloodshed devoid of any real story.

Full Review | Original Score: F

It's Gibson's taste for carnage that defeats him in the end. The brutality is relentless, and the many ways in which blood is spilt so ingenious, that it's numbing. Once the adrenaline rush subsides, there's nothing left.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5

Mel Gibson follows up "The Passion of the Christ," his entrée into directing schlock B-move horror films with high production values, with an even more gory study into bodily torture and death.

Full Review | Original Score: C

Apocalypto is pornographically violent.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/5

Perhaps Gibson is trying to shock us into absorbing the torment and severity of man's inhumanity to man. The tragedy is that the film has the opposite effect: As we are bombarded by savagery, we become inured to it.

Full Review | Original Score: 1.5/4

The buzz is wrong. Apocalypto is unquestionably the most reprehensible, brain-dead and offensive movie I've seen all year, and this year has been a doozy.

Full Review | Original Score: .5/4

You have to really look for it, to see the political commentary in Mel's make-up extravaganza, which can be spotted not so much in the snoozy National Geographic-ky first half, as in the second half's retracking of Rambo's bushes. But it's there if you wa

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/5

It has more in common with every modern Hollywood crowd pleaser than anything else- complete with crotch jokes, nagging mother-in-laws, and silly dialogue.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/4

Gibson has grown increasingly bald-faced with his thematic (if you can call them that) preoccupations, dropping the markers in his path like bloody footprints.

Full Review

A web of death-drives, false devotions, lofty pretenses, auto-plagiarisms, sound but inarticulate craftsmanship, and lowest-common-denominator provisions of trauma as entertainment.

Full Review | Original Score: F

a borderline movie stuck with a remarkably difficult marketing problem and lots of bloody violence.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/4

Mayan culture excelled in mathematics, astronomy, art and urban planning but Mel's only interested in its savage cruelty and sadistic barbarity.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/10