Mystic River Reviews
L.A. Weekly
Where Lehane's novel seethes with emotionally charged subtext, Eastwood's workmanlike direction feels static -- fatally tasteful, embalmed in gravitas -- while his sporadic efforts at dramatic heightening come off as vulgar cliché.
Movie Mom at Yahoo! Movies
It wants to be a big, serious movie. It has big, serious star power and big, serious themes. There are moments of power and flickers of meaning but it is ultimately hollow and unsatisfying.
| Original Score: C
Top CriticToo depressing to fill audiences with delight, but it does seem to validate questionable attitudes, especially an indifference to the suffering of innocent people and a willingness to shoot first and ask questions later.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/4
Critic Doctor
'Mystic River' is an ambitious failure but it is, ultimately, a failure. It is a shame because there are a lot of little things that I liked about it even as the big things never quite added up.
Fantastica Daily
Up the Mystic River without a paddle is how I felt about halfway into this soggy Eastwood-meets-melodrama mess of a movie.
ToxicUniverse.com
And I take a page from Ann Miller and say it's all a load of horse-puckey.
Full Review
| Original Score: 1/5
Filmcritic.com
Slowly trudges through the motions of a tired whodunit, saving its dramatic juices for a blowout finale that never comes.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/5
Film Threat
Plodding, emotionally inert, overlong, badly framed, inappropriately scored and polluted with an ensemble who try to outdo each other with bad performances.
Full Review
| Original Score: 1.5/5
Boulder Weekly
Eastwood encourages Penn to overact, and Penn Method-ically responds with the enthusiasm of the amateur talents in Waiting for Guffman.
Offoffoff
After many meticulously drawn connections, it's a disappointment to see most of our two-plus hours of careful attention thrown away.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/4
About.com
Despite the faultless execution, this ultimately unedifying story of pointless murder is ... hopelessly contrived.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/5
Daily Telegraph
Deeply serious, sombre, long and humourless, it reeks of integrity. Eastwood's best since Unforgiven? Maybe, but it's the one I'd least like to sit through again.
Peterborough This Week
Less a taut whodunit than a dreary who-cares-it, Mystic River is muddy-swamp-slow and about as appealing to look at
Full Review | Original Score: 2/5
DustinPutman.com
A melodramatic murder-mystery that is as uneven as its outcome is anticlimactic.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/4
Montreal Film Journal
There is a solid story here, but it's weakened by heavy-handed dialogue, strained symbolism and subplots that don't got anywhere.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/4
Coast (Halifax, Nova Scotia)
Fiction doesn't survive on believability alone. The unilluminating Mystic River offers depression without insight; drama without purpose.
IGN Movies
Despite all involved, Mystic River never quite equals the sum of its parts.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/5
Juicy Cerebellum
There's no emotional connection to the characters. This is cookie cutter anguish meant to manipulate the gullible into believing that they're watching something meaningful.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/10
Mark Reviews Movies
An apprehensive cross between an elegiac tone poem of loss, an ever-twisting murder mystery, and a character study revolving around the regret of lost innocence, Mystic River tries to be all of these things and ends up falling short on all counts.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/4
Hollywood Report Card
The performances are all good. However, the film experiences one coincidence after the other, manipulating its audiences rather heavy-handedly.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/4
