The Reluctant Fundamentalist Reviews

The heavy-handedness -- the strip-search begins with the loud thwack of rubber gloves -- reduces Hamid's characters to talking points.

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The laziest sort of political cinema, full of straw men and finger-pointing, wrapped up in an awards-friendly bow by its beautiful cinematography and a manipulative world music-y score.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/4

It most disappoints as a thriller, the flashbacks and voiceovers and romantic entanglements so dominating the proceedings you forget that someone is bound and gagged in real time.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/5

Mira Nair again reminds us of her frustrating inconsistency as a filmmaker, enlisting a fine cast and strong technicals - Declan Quinn's sumptuous cinematography is particularly enchanting - but failing to cover the, ahem, fundamentals first.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/5

When Nair tries to take in the larger picture, her focus goes slack, and all that's left is a blur.

Full Review | Original Score: B-

The Reluctant Fundamentalist collapses in a heap of wool-gathering humanism that feels warm to the touch, yet fatally hedges its political bets.

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All the elements are there to tell a sharp, strong story, but director Mira Nair and screenwriter William Wheeler take the events of the day and simplify them into a blunt force object where subtlety and wit are replaced by sermonizing and melodramatics.

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The movie's failures are all the more unfortunate because they detract from its central and conspicuous success, the performance of Riz Ahmed in the title role.

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"The Reluctant Fundamentalist" often feels as if it's going nowhere. By the time it reaches its ambiguous conclusion, at least it should have helped us understand where Changez is coming from, but it doesn't.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/4

Come for the barrage of clunky plot devices but stay for the morally repugnant comparison between religious radical killers and capitalists.

Full Review | Original Score: 1.5/4

By literalizing the idea of American military aggression and all that it implies Ms. Nair doesn't just invest Mr. Hamid's story with Hollywood-style beats, she also completely drains it of ambiguity.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5

A film unfortunately characterized by as much cake-and-eat-it ambivalence as those commitment challenged lovebirds. And with an ideological resolution wavering between two extremes, and in the end neither of them.

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Alas, the film's relevance - and ultimately sane upshot - is buried beneath a meandering and oft-implausible plot.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/4

Takes [the book's] riveting tale and flattens it, blunting much of the nuance that made it a great read.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/4

[It] proves what we all knew or suspected. Good art isn't about ideological bookkeeping.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5

A provocative political thriller which, despite Riz Ahmed's electrifying central performance, is too uneven and over-stated to realise its dramatic and polemical ambitions.

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In the end it feels oddly unsatisfying, because the film's jumbled structure undermines the point it's making.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5

Despite the charismatic efforts of the British actor Ahmed, The Reluctant Fundamentalist gets bogged down in proselytizing and plot.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/4

Fairly insightful as a drama, but barely adequate as a thriller. Ahmed is pitch-perfect as the conflicted hero, but he's in two movies that cancel each other out.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/4

Ahmed excels and the set-up is compelling but ultimately this is middle rank stuff from the Monsoon Wedding director.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5