All the King's Men: Critic Reviews

All around him, Penn's costars retract in defeat.

Like an electioneering candidate, Steve Zaillian's version of All the Kings Men makes a lot of promises but fails to deliver the goods.

All the King's Men aspires to be a profound commentary on political corruption, but it's more of a vehicle for scenery-chewing by Sean Penn.

All the King's Men hasn't been directed so much as over-directed, although the result, when you make an effort to filter out all the film school pyrotechnics, is an honorable run at Robert Penn Warren's classic novel.

All the King's Men is a big, important awards-season special with one glaring problem: It doesn't have anything urgent or even interesting to say.

Penn goes for larger-than-life, wrapping his pinched frown around an unintelligible Louisiana drawl and swinging his arms like an autistic evangelist.

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.

In the end this murky remake functions mainly as a plain-wrapper setting for a fancy piece of acting that gets lost in a void. Who needs it? Who needed it in the first place?

It's too full of itself; it's too convinced of its own value to be much of any to audiences.

Watching All the King's Men's downward tumble makes for perverse fun, with the emphasis on perverse.

No use getting sore that one art form trumps another. It's not the first time an outstanding book became a ponderous film.

Sean Penn demonstrates how a great Method actor can make the world's most unconvincing rabble-rouser.

The director can't seem to find a natural rhythm for the movie -- it's portentous and vague at the same time.

All the King's Men is miscast. The soundtrack is awful. The storyline is confusing. The cinematography is too slick and pretty, when we should be bathed in a sultry, sweaty, sticky, gritty atmosphere.

Watching scene after scene linger and expire in this haplessly faithful version of the 1946 Robert Penn Warren novel, it's impossible to tell what compelled adapter-director Steven Zaillian to address the material in the first place.

The unfocused story is so bereft of any clear sense of period or location that the political melodrama sometimes seems to be taking place inside a cigar box.

In essence, a wild soap opera disguised as a political allegory, it's a movie, with its over-the-map performances, that is worth catching only for the inadvertent laugh or two.

All the King's Men has all the ingredients of thrilling political drama without actually being very dramatic.

Ungainly and bloated with an unearned sense of self-importance, All the King's Men is nevertheless worth watching for Sean Penn's mesmerizing performance as a corrupt politician who exults in his own dirty ways.

Although there's a tremendous amount of firepower on-screen, much of it goes to waste, as Zaillian struggles to maintain momentum.

A sorry and misguided rehash of Robert Penn Warren's famous 1946 novel.

Overstuffed and fatally miscast, All the King's Men never comes to life.

[It] isn't going to win any awards for Law, a frantically hamming Penn or anyone else involved.

All the King's Men is the noblest kind of film failure -- high-minded, literary, cautionary, well-cast and pretty well-acted.