Broken City Reviews
Top CriticSomewhere in here there's a cogent, timely attack on the links between business and politics.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/5
If you're in the mood for some slick trash featuring great actors slumming it without phoning it in, "Broken City" is a crackling good time.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/5
Most of the roles are so ambiguous you end up scratching your head in the final reel, and some of the loose ends are so irrelevant they seem to have ended up on the cutting-room floor.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/4
What follows is not a review; it's an autopsy...one long (illustrated!) spoiler.
[An] overproduced, underobserved, yet agreeably twisty new political thriller ...
Did these people - or even these people's people - not bother to read the script first?
Full Review
| Original Score: 1/4
It is not that Broken City -- boasting a cast worth big expectations -- is bad, exactly. But it is deeply mediocre. When they say television dramas are getting the better of the movies, this is the sort of middling outing that proves it.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/4
Broken City is one of those movies in which characters keep reminding you that nothing is what it seems, and sure enough, there's more going on here than mere infidelity. But the audience is hard-pressed to follow exactly what it is.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/4
The film is a collection of crime noir oddments that don't add up to a full meal.
Full Review
| Original Score: C
When any film works, it's a miracle; when it doesn't, it's this.
A more-than-pleasant change from the month's parade of horror films and trash comedies.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
Like the film's shady mayor, "Broken City" is a little too slick for its own good.
Full Review
| Original Score: C+
You may want to account for low expectations, but the crime drama "Broken City" turns out to be much better -- and funnier and more suspenseful -- than both trailer and release date portend.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/4
In the end, Wahlberg knows what he needs to know and takes sober satisfaction in a job well done. And the audience knows everything, too, but is less satisfied.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/4
Few, if any, of the characters are believable and the twists the story takes are telegraphed well beforehand, or fairly guessable. Much of the plot gets bogged down with excess exposition.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/4
Nothing clicks, nothing resonates, everything's broken.
Full Review
| Original Score: 1.5/5
It's frustrating, because the cast is so natty and ready for action.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/4
The only reason to see this dreary parade of deception and venality is Mark Wahlberg's performance as a disgraced ex-cop caught up in the thick of menacing events he can't understand.
"Broken City" wants to get heavy about politics and corruption, but all it's really saying is: 'Twas ever thus.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/4
As an opportunity for hard-boiled types to trade threats, blows and caustic banter, this modern-day noir works reasonably well.
Another January dud. Broken City drops hot-shot actors in a quicksand of clichés and watches them sink.
Full Review
| Original Score: 1.5/4
Wahlberg does what Wahlberg does, bringing muscular conviction to his troubled, tough-guy role. The city may be broken, but the movie star's formula is working fine.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
Wahlberg, at least, keeps the story watchable. But even he can't fix what's irreversibly broken.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/5
You could do worse on a slow Saturday night when there's nothing else on cable. But as the implausibilities and conspiracies and double-crosses pile up, "Broken City" paints itself into a corner.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/4
Less than 24 hours later, I recall it with all the clarity of something I half-watched on a plane with a hangover in 1996.
The actors look generally unhappy to be here, most of all Crowe, who seems even more miserable than he did in Les Misérables.
As it turns out, there are eight million and one stories in the naked city.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/5
Did "Broken City" have to be quite so dull and humorless and artificial?
Full Review
| Original Score: 1.5/4
I can't tell you with a straight face "Broken City" is "any good," but I can make the case you'll have a good time even when the screenplay is breaking bad.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
A movie with Lumet-ian aspirations which, like the corrupt NYC mayor at its center, can barely handle the weight of its own ambitions.
Broken City is an evocative and over-ambitious title for a so-so political potboiler that wants to be a gritty, expansive epic of moral and urban decay.
Would have made for a fine film noir 60 years ago but feels rather contrived and unbelievable in the setting of contemporary New York.
Everything is simultaneously too complicated and overly spelled out.
Full Review
| Original Score: 1.5/4
