The Lookout Reviews
Top CriticI left the theater entertained but not fully satisfied.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/4
Murphy's Movie Reviews
My interest waxed and waned. The set up for the film seemed to take eons. Frank overstuffed the script with exposition, multiple subplots and some seemingly unnecessary sequences. Just as I was ready to dismiss the movie, he switched gears.
Full Review
| Original Score: C+
Boxoffice Magazine
One senses the screenplay was repeatedly worked over in a seminar or honed using a software program. With stock characters, salty language, caper tension and heartfelt drama, it's calculated to please.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/5
CinePassion
A professional script professionally shot, rather than a personal story burning to be told
Slant Magazine
The Lookout becomes something of a standard-issue, sub-Elmore Leonard caper in which double-crosses and inconvenient surprises lead to murder
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/4
Instead of a funny heist flick or a comedy with thrills, [writer Scott Frank] sketches out a gentle sine wave of a movie. It oscillates from not very funny to not very thrilling without ever being in a hurry to get where it's going.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/4
Movies for the Masses
epibebaionei tin ypopsia poy eihes ligo meta tin arhi, oti tha parabei ton basiko kanona poy tosin ora soy promotare: den mporeis na peis mia istoria, an den ksereis poy thes na tin pas
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/5
Ozus' World Movie Reviews
The straightforward routine story has plot holes you can drive a tractor through and a screenplay that's too clean for the messy story it's spinning.
Full Review
| Original Score: C+
Not Coming to a Theater Near You
It is as if [Frank] trashes the entire mechanism altogether, resulting in a spoonfed conclusion, rewarding facile expectations and violating the integrity of his film's well-established structure.
Orlando Weekly
Throwing a mentally impaired dude into a heist drama doesn't really add much. There are times when the audience will forget that Chris is disabled, partially because Gordon-Levitt isn't very persuasive.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/5
Daily Telegraph
It's a pity Frank is too busy laying on the wintry atmospherics to make the story grip as it should.
Sleekly tooled but eminently forgettable.
Joseph Gordon-Levitt, as a fellow who has suffered serious head trauma, comes up with such a moody Method assemblage of twitches, tics, and guilty Memento mannerisms that he's not much fun to watch.
Full Review
| Original Score: C
Film Journal International
This film leaves you hoping for a project truly worthy of Gordon-Levitt's gifts.
The dour, downbeat story eventually spirals into grisly Grand Guignol and contrivance.
Los Angeles Daily News
The reason why [The Lookout] took so long to get produced is readily apparent: The people in this movie may be entertaining, morally complicated, even fascinating -- but persuasive they just aren't.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/4
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
The Lookout is without the noose-tightening suspense or moral complexities of similarly themed thrillers. And the rare bits of business or color are too familiar and derivative to be diverting, and point to a conclusion that is ultimately the same.
| Original Score: 2.5/4
Philadelphia Daily News
We know what's coming, [writer-director] Frank knows we know. His challenge is to make us care regardless. I confess that I didn't.
Full Review
| Original Score: C+
San Diego Union-Tribune
Tends to bubble along as a plot-boiler. Chris' guilty fantasy about the past girlfriend, just as he works up nerve for some major action, is the kind of twist that one studies screenwriting to learn and then surpass.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/4
There's nothing here you haven't seen before, and even the pleasant hum of a well-tuned engine begins to drone a little.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/6
