Harsh Times: Critic Reviews

Bale is mesmerizing and Rodriguez keeps up with him as the whole unsafe contraption zooms.

The film builds to a melodramatic finale that would like to make you weep, but by then it has worn out your patience.

The film amounts to a harsh and perpetual assault on viewers' sensibilities -- not only because of its violence but because of its overall bleakness.

...If the movie is a comment on the dire straits of our returning soldiers, it's unconvincing.

[Bale's performance is] the kind of vein-popping show-boating that might as well be performed in a mirror.

Though Bale has the presence of a young De Niro, and the same volatile edge, he's being asked here to fill out a role that doesn't ring true on any level.

It's an ugly, brutal picture, and it's not about 'times' but rather timeless macho posturing run amok.

This is a powerful film that combines a number of 'what if' situations with some true tragic moments and even a number of oddly funny situations.

Harsh Times is almost a good, salty urban thriller.

[A] sour but haunting tale.

...The movie consists of waiting for what you know is going to come. Waiting some more. And then waiting some more.

Harsh Times is an hour-by-hour diary of two crazy, unreliable, irresponsible dudes trying to find a way to fit into the same society they hate, facing one hurdle after another until they appear to butcher half of Los Angeles.

When your model is clearly Taxi Driver, a lack of directorial flair is especially conspicuous.

Ayer's writing is loaded with wit and malice.

Endless scenes of the two guys riding along, venting and cursing and chugging beers play like acting-class exercises, badly written ones at that.

Harsh Times is so into its own nihilism, it sometimes forgets the humanity beneath the hurt.

Harsh Times opens with a deadly nightmare and ends with a vast bloodbath - in between, things get a little gruesome.

Few individuals who go off to war and experience its devastation and chaos return as the same person. This factor lies at the heart of what Harsh Times illustrates.

A vivid but ultimately wearisome portrait of Los Angeles' violent underbelly, redeemed by a powerfully intense lead performance from Christian Bale.

Unpleasantly grim and often nasty just to be nasty, writer-director David Ayer's Harsh Times is more an ordeal than a movie.

The slang, the modes of dress, even the styles of fighting all have a high degree of specificity that lifts the movie above most urban crime dramas.