On the Road Reviews

A booze-soaked, drug-riddled, sex-filled escapade with no real point about young people casting off whatever yokes chain them and seeing what's out there. It captures the pure exhilaration of freedom for its own sake.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5

If our On the Road is a barely coherent tightrope act - a fizzy word drunk stand-up speed-rapped by an aspiring poet posing as a dumb saint prole - then it's tough to take this pretty version, populated by Gap models in retro Americana fashions.

Full Review | Original Score: 81/100

The movie version of "On the Road" won't have the impact on a person that the book ever did. But it does go some way to explaining why the book did.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4

At just over two hours, its challenging to stay invested in the movie and its choppy, rambling storyline. As a filmic experience, however, it serves as an interesting companion piece to the similarly challenging 'The Master.'

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/5

Not a film for the masses....the story is laced with sex, drugs and nudity, but it is a capable character study of a group of young friends who could be part of any generation.

Full Review

A pretty disappointment.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5

Considering the central characters would become the dominant figures of the Beat movement, it's unbelievable how pedestrian their antics prove, not to mention how through-the-roof the picture's corn quotient is. Could the soundtrack have more bongo music?

Full Review

Salles approaches Kerouac's raw, restless and spontaneous work in such a staid and conservative manner that the movie might as well be a lesser Merchant-Ivory production from the team's late-'90s period of decline.

Full Review | Original Score: 1.5/4

The filmmakers are intelligent and gifted, but they fail to provide a satisfying answer to the question facing anyone who might want to make a movie version of 'On the Road,' namely: Why bother?

Full Review | Original Score: 2/4

Even Stewart, exuding more passion than in all five Twilight movies, registers more fully than the preening leads.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/4

Jack Kerouac's Beat Generation bible "On the Road" was experimental, experiential and ephemeral in a way Walter Salles' film never captures or portrays.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/4

If the movie weren't so visually eloquent at evoking post-war America, it might prove unbearable.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/4

Salles aims to do for Jack Kerouac what he did for Che Guevara, i.e., to make him and his pals rock stars.

Full Review

What Salles gets just right is the sense of speed - of lives lived too fast, of the blacktop passing before their windshield in a blur.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4

This pretty period-pictorial companion piece to the novel fatally misses out on the brain-firing raw buzz that Kerouac felt and passed on to his readers...

Full Review | Original Score: 2/4

Hedlund is too pretty and not quite as maniacally charming as Dean. Riley's Kerouac is even more apprehensive than the one in the novel, and that raspy voice he uses is distracting.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/5

The film has a dreamy nocturnal lyricism, especially in scenes of Moriarty's streamlined 1949 Hudson Commodore hurtling across America's lamp-lit highways.

Full Review | Original Score: B plus

It's not a wreck of a movie; it's not a sleek race car either. But there's heat to be felt here.

Full Review | Original Score: B

Walter Salles's warm but strangely staid adaptation of a piece of literature that was never meant to be tamed as cinema.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/4

This makes for a rather uninspired film that, despite being based off of a novel considered a classic, fails to grab the viewer's attention with its meandering storyline and characters that drift in and out of the picture.

Full Review | Original Score: 1.5/4