The Reluctant Fundamentalist Reviews
Top CriticIt 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.
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| Original Score: 2.5/5
There's much to enjoy in 'The Reluctant Fundamentalist': fine photography, juicy supporting turns from Kiefer Sutherland and Om Puri, and a powerfully sustained sense of a man adrift in a world going mad.
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| Original Score: 3/5
This sure-handed adaptation of Mohsin Hamid's international best seller shows Nair at her best.
Deliberately ambiguous, "The Reluctant Fundamentalist" provides just enough answers while leaving us with more than enough questions.
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| Original Score: 4.5/5
Despite the charismatic efforts of the British actor Ahmed, The Reluctant Fundamentalist gets bogged down in proselytizing and plot.
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| Original Score: 2.5/4
Takes [the book's] riveting tale and flattens it, blunting much of the nuance that made it a great read.
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| Original Score: 2.5/4
Handsomely crafted and smartly performed, the film works on its own terms. But in expanding the story's canvas, it dilutes rather than translates the power of the book.
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| Original Score: 3/4
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.
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| Original Score: 2.5/4
Nair's film draws a clear parallel between violent Islamic fundamentalism and job-destroying capitalist economic fundamentalism, and firmly rejects both. If only good intentions made up for heavy-handed dramatics.
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| Original Score: 2.5/4
Nair is so busy making sure we never lose sympathy for her handsome and charming protagonist that the film ultimately founders in a tangle of humanist platitudes.
It's a dogged, thoughtful and well-acted movie that might have been more effective if it kept a narrower focus.
Timeliness is certainly on the side of Mira Nair's uneven but fascinating The Reluctant Fundamentalist.
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| Original Score: B+
A movie imposing in its breadth and depth.
Alas, the film's relevance - and ultimately sane upshot - is buried beneath a meandering and oft-implausible plot.
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| Original Score: 2/4
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.
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| Original Score: 2/5
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.
If there ever was a time to see "The Reluctant Fundamentalist," that time is here and now.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/5
The Reluctant Fundamentalist collapses in a heap of wool-gathering humanism that feels warm to the touch, yet fatally hedges its political bets.
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.
Ahmed keeps bringing the focus back to an intriguingly ambiguous center. His scenes with Schreiber have a crackling tension, and he pushes back against the script's obvious manipulations.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/5
As the story unfolds, new dimensions change our perceptions of the central characters, sometimes for better, and occasionally for worse. The point is that every character and every setting has at least two sides.
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| Original Score: 3/4
Even as you question Changez's every Agitator 101 utterance-and the film's slapdash attempts to use him as a vehicle for a grand statement about the shock, awe and alienation of our modern world-you can't help but fall under his magnetic spell.
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| Original Score: 3/5
At times it's dense and sluggish, too much like a novel. But there is some exhilaration to be had ...
The tense dialogue between East and Post post-9/11 is turned into a tense, often gripping duet between a young Muslim professor and American reporter.
