Epic Reviews
Top CriticAlthough the basic story is too juvenile and simplistic to entertain anyone with an age in the double-digit range, the themes and underlying ideas are too complicated to capture the attention of someone younger.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/4
Director Chris Wedge falls into the common animator's trap of making the "human" characters a lot duller than the nonhuman creepy-crawlies.
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| Original Score: C+
With its array of goofy sidekicks (Aziz Ansari as a slug almost runs away with the whole picture) and carefully crafted relationships, Epic certainly manages to tell a compelling tale.
A 3D eco-fantasy whose mantra-like insistence that we're all connected by nature is one of the main things that underscores the abject insincerity of the sentiment as the movie articulates it, "Epic" is very nearly epic in its stifling mediocrity.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/5
Anyone over the age of 7 or so - not to mention their accompanying adults - isn't going to find too much here to truly engage them, let alone linger past the final fade out.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/4
Children may enjoy it, but even they will be able to see all the boxes it systematically ticks.
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| Original Score: 2/4
It may not be epic, but it's eye-popping entertainment.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/4
[It] is certainly very pretty to look at, and has a general agreeability about it. But the movie would need to engage us far more powerfully for that hyperbolic title to fit.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/4
Generic entertainment with a brave heroine, cutesy-poo supporting characters, parental figures who are either absent or absent-minded, etcetera, etcetera.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/4
The emotional connection that should have the crowd cheering wildly for the heroes and booing the villains never clicks in.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/5
As beautiful as it is, "Epic" is fatally lacking in visceral momentum and dramatic edge.
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| Original Score: 2.5/5
Epic's visuals are enthralling enough for little and big folks to offset a predictable, albeit sweet, story.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/4
"Epic" may be the thinking family's best Saturday matinee of the summer. And the date movie of the season.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/4
Even young would-be botanists will find this charmless animated adventure as exciting as watching grass grow.
Full Review
| Original Score: 1/5
In the roll call of visually distinctive 'toons, "Epic" looms large.
So generic it might as well come in a black-and-white box: Animated Adventure TBD.
Full Review
| Original Score: C-
With its secret, magical worlds and legions of evil-battling leafy warriors, there's plenty here to engage young audiences of both genders.
I had the sensation of sitting through a fourth-grade school play that contained no children of my own: the very definition of a nightmare.
Full Review
| Original Score: 1.5/4
It's difficult to keep its story and characters, or even its visual design, in your mind's eye, in part because the five credited screenwriters overload the narrative with incident and threatening complication.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/4
The story's simple enough to appeal to young kids (the 8-year-old with me pronounced the movie "awesome"), but adults will enjoy the beautiful animation, whether 3D or 2D.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/4
When the filmmakers take little detours from the reluctant-warrior-accepts-his/her-destiny plot, it brings some desperately needed livening up to what otherwise feels like a crushingly by-the-numbers kid saga.
The story lacks the specialness of a Pixar movie - it retreads the same eco-battle archetypes as FernGully and Avatar - but it's a perfectly appealing explosion of color for a lazy summer day.
Full Review
| Original Score: B+
If this is all familiar territory even to film-literate young children, it's nonetheless executed with professionalism and a few dashes of panache.
