Ebert gave it one half of a star

Well, Mark Kermode declared it one of the most awful movies of the century so far and predicted that during the 95 years left of this century, not too many movies crappier than this will see the light of day. Well, I guess he's overstating his case - but only a tiny little bit as it most certainly IS one of the most idiotic movies I've ever seen, filled to the brim with laughably banal, unforgivingly relentless pseudo-metaphysical claptrap that the boneheaded Mr Ritchie clearly thinks is a bottomless well of originality and wisdom. I can only hazard a guess the lad just learned to read and given to whom he's married to, the first book he cracked open was some Kabbalah-related drivel. Hence this movie - nearly two hours of painfully overreaching bald-faced pretention; a busy, flashy spectacle signifying nothing at all; an incoherent, incomprehensible, awfully structured and paced jumble of a narrative; "snappy" and "cool"smartass dialogue that would've felt tired and trite 60 bloody years ago... and, to top it all off, possibly the worst use of voiceover narration in the cinematic history - a tortuous repetition of faux-intellectual slogans that keep coming back like an awful case of migraine hammering you into submission. Plus, despite all the rapid editing and garish color schemes, the film is just plain tedious and boring with no narrative drive or character development (the acting here would be more accurately described as posing). Quite simply, an utter disaster. Sure, even Ritchie's first two films were no more than empty exercises in smug, self satisfied "style", sort of like cockney versions of Tarantino'esque cool, but at least they were kind of mildly amusing in places and never had any delusions that they'd got anything of substance to communicate... here, however... oh man. Whatta miserable thing. One would think Ritchie had to study in order to be able to make a movie as horrid as this.



"facts are stupid things" Ronald Reagan