The disastrously hollow All the King's Men forgoes entertainment in favor of trying to cause death by way of crushing boredom.
Comment
09/23/06
All The King's Men (2006)
11
%
Tomatometer
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Reviews Counted:150
Fresh:17
Rotten:133
Average Rating:4.2/10
Consensus: With its star-studded cast and hallowed source material (the novel of the same name won the Pulitzer Prize, and the 1949 original film took home a best picture Oscar), All the King's Men has the pedigree of a prestige picture. Don't be fooled. With a scenery-chewing performance from Sean Penn, an absence of political insight, and an overall lack of narrative cohesiveness, Men gives Oscar bait a bad name.
Theatrical Release:27-10-2006
Synopsis: Based on Robert Penn Warren's 1946 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, All the King's Men tells the story of an idealist's rise to power in the world of Louisiana politics and the corruption that leads... [More]
Starring: Sean Penn, Jude Law, Patricia Clarkson, Kate Winslet
Director: Steven Zallian
Reviews for All The King's Men
The dots don't connect. The picture is exasperatingly incomplete.
09/22/06
Some will undoubtedly find Penn's ham-boned, spittle-lashing performance a bit much, but it's a pretty close to Warren's original conception.
09/22/06
All the King's Men was suspended in editing limbo for nearly a year, and the final result only makes the mind reel at what it could have been carved from.
09/22/06
It's Zaillian's overdirection that cooks this whole mess into a flavorless gumbo. He never shows you something just once when he could show it twice and never leaves a point unhammered home.
09/22/06
All the King's Men is full of bits that work; unfortunately, they never quite add up to a whole.
09/22/06
It has a labored feel. The editing is choppy, allowing little of the film to flow naturally.
09/22/06
Lavish meandering provides more density than depth, for the one magnet of interest is Willie Stark.
09/22/06
Basically, this remake of All the King's Men is a nice way to take a two-hour nap, despite Sean Penn's fervent attempts to wake you up.
09/22/06
All the King's Men doesn't reveal anything new about the ins and outs of politics, even as it insists, via showy visuals and James Horner's sledgehammer score, that it is revelatory.
09/22/06
Zaillian's script fails to build narrative power or delve deeply enough into character motivation to astonish or move filmgoers, at least to the degree that it should.
09/22/06
All the King's Men looks good. It's beautifully designed and well shot by cinematographer Pawel Edelman. But make no mistake, it's a bad movie.
09/22/06
It's not good, but there's some good stuff in it, as might be expected with a trio of Oscar-winning actors gnawing on a script by director Steve Zaillian.
09/22/06
All the King's Men is the noblest kind of film failure -- high-minded, literary, cautionary, well-cast and pretty well-acted.
09/22/06
Stilted, inert and unpersuasive, Zaillian's film lacks the heat, poetry and resonance that might make its story of political corruption and personal insufficiency grab hold of a modern audience.
09/22/06
Crawford showed us a man who sold his soul to do good and then, soulless, found himself incapable of resisting evil; Penn gives us a smart actor tearing into an awards-baiting role.
09/22/06
[It] isn't going to win any awards for Law, a frantically hamming Penn or anyone else involved.
09/22/06
Failures on the scale of writer-director Steven Zaillian's All the King's Men are as rare as falling sequoias, and they make a noise even if no one's in the woods to hear them.
09/22/06
Not even Sean Penn can put All the King's Men back together again.
09/22/06
It's the kind of picture that is so eager to celebrate its self-importance and social significance, it suffocates under its own seriousness.
09/22/06
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