Troy

Chicago Tribune Michael Wilmington

In a league with Hollywood's top historical epics, ancient or otherwise. It's stunningly handsome film, with an equally stunning cast and engrossing story.

Seattle Post-Intelligencer William Arnold

An exhilarating piece of epic filmmaking that it pulls you in, sweeps you up and works very much as its own thing.

Time Richard Corliss

In this vigorous, stalwart epic, they blend martial breadth and emotional intimacy, honor and obsession, romance and machismo to show the glamour and folly of war.

Newsweek Jeff Giles

Troy is a fun, energizing piece of summer entertainment, even if it doesn't have the depth or the sustained intensity of "Gladiator."

Rolling Stone Peter Travers

Troy lacks the focus of Gladiator, not to mention that Oscar winner's scrappy wit. But why kick a gift horse when you're in summer-movie heaven?

USA Today Claudia Puig

Entertainingly epic eye candy.

Christian Science Monitor David Sterritt

In sum, this is hardly an "Iliad" adaptation for the ages. But if you're hankering for sand, sandals, and swordplay, this could be the movie for you.

Philadelphia Inquirer Carrie Rickey

When the film focuses on the Trojans, it's splendid. But when Troy attempts to sort out the competing agendas of the Greeks, it drags.

New York Daily News Jack Mathews

A "Ben-Hur"-size epic with beefcake, beauty, outsize heroes, flashy duels and epic battles. There are breathtaking vistas, taut political intrigues, dangerous romantic liaisons and one of the greatest wardrobes ever assembled for a costume drama.

Premiere Sara Brady

Wolfgang Petersen's Troy recalls an age when Hollywood not only gambled on but flourished with grandiose epics and casts of thousands, and brings megawatt star power to what is, at root, a brilliantly told story.

San Francisco Chronicle Mick LaSalle

All Hollywood and no Homer, but within its limits, it's a vigorous, entertaining movie.

Washington Post Stephen Hunter

Far from great, but much farther from awful, Troy offers several popcorn buckets' worth of good old-fashioned time at the movies.

The New Republic Stanley Kauffmann

When a spectacular film rests on at least a minimal armature of character and cogent action, as Troy does, we can just sink back and enjoy. What we enjoy is the sovereignty over time and place and the force of gravity that film has given to the world.

Washington Post Desson Thomson

That's the only way to enjoy Wolfgang Petersen's nearly three-hour epic: as a Pitt vehicle. In a role that requires larger-than-life dimensions, he's pretty terrific.

The New Yorker David Denby

The movie is successful -- harsh, serious, and both exhilarating and tragic, the right tonal combination for Homer. [17 May 2004, p. 107]

Miami Herald Rene Rodriguez

For a movie whose characters are so preoccupied with immortality, Troy is curiously forgettable.

Baltimore Sun Michael Sragow

This handsome and occasionally exciting movie flounders because it confuses Tinseltown glamour with legendary heroism and beauty.

ReelViews James Berardinelli

There are times when Troy is stirring and engaging. However, at least as often, it is flat.

Chicago Reader Jonathan Rosenbaum

It has plenty of visual sweep, fine action sequences, and, thanks especially to Brad Pitt (as Achilles) and Peter O'Toole (as King Priam), a deeper sense of character than one might expect from a sword-and-sandal epic.

Film Threat Pete Vonder Haar

Isn’t a bad film, simply an unspectacular one, which might be a more damaging statement.

Dallas Observer Bill Gallo

Homer would be hard-pressed to find any remaining shred of "The Iliad" in this over-the-top entertainment. It has a lot of loud passion but not much poetry, and that's appropriate for a movie that could well be subtitled My Big Fat Greek Bloodletting.

New York Magazine Peter Rainer

Except for a few brilliant flashes, mostly from Peter O'Toole as Hector’s father, the Trojans' magisterially woebegone King Priam, Troy is a fairly routine action picture with an advanced case of grandeuritis.

Variety Todd McCarthy

Despite a sensationally attractive cast and an array of well-staged combat scenes presented on a vast scale, Wolfgang Petersen's highly telescoped rendition of the Trojan War lurches ahead in fits and starts for much of its hefty running time, to OK effect.

The New York Times Dana Stevens

For what it is -- a big, expensive, occasionally campy action movie full of well-known actors speaking in well-rounded accents -- Troy is not bad. It has the blocky, earnest integrity of a classic comic book, and it labors to respect the strangeness and grandeur of its classical sources.

Empire Will Lawrence

Bruising battles and some stirring performances make Troy enjoyable, if rather long. But if audiences can forgive the camp, they'll still struggle to empathise with the characters.

Portland Oregonian Karen Karbo

In the end, the battle scenes are elegant and compelling and there are some fine moments when O'Toole, as Priam, summons his inner Lawrence of Arabia and makes us believe that we're actually watching a tragic altercation that brought down great men descended from gods.

Chicago Sun-Times Roger Ebert

The movie sidesteps the existence of the Greek gods, turns its heroes into action movie cliches and demonstrates that we're getting tired of computer-generated armies.

Boston Globe Ty Burr

At its intermittent best, Troy suggests a primitive pro-wrestling smackdown with epochal consequences. At its worst, it's a throwback to the ham-fisted sword-and-sandal international coproductions of the early 1960s: "The 300 Spartans" with better sets. Barely.

Los Angeles Times Kenneth Turan

Given everything, it's no surprise that the verdict on the film has to be a split decision. Troy is a movie you believe in physically...Believing in Troy emotionally, however, presents a greater challenge.

Charlotte Observer Lawrence Toppman

What do you get if you start with the first great narrative of Western civilization, then remove all the psychological complexity and profound characterization? Troy.

Village Voice Michael Atkinson

Hardly gay camp for nothing, sword-and-sandal epics cannot help but teeter on the brink of self-mockery, and Troy, for all its grim seriousness, embraces both the clichés and the beefcake.

Entertainment Weekly Lisa Schwarzbaum

The result is a pageant long but not deep, noisy but not stirring, expensive but not sumptuous.

TV Guide Maitland McDonagh

Even the dramatic heavy hitters, who include Cox, Gleeson, O'Toole and Julie Christie, as Achilles' mother, are powerless in the face of Pitt's yawning hollowness.

Slate David Edelstein

Often plays like what it is: a clunky toga-and-sandals picture, with Hollywood compromises abounding.

The Hollywood Reporter Kirk Honeycutt

A protracted and uninvolving affair in which men battle over issues that audiences may struggle to find compelling, and no central figure emerges to take command of the film.

The Globe and Mail (Toronto) Rick Groen

All costume and scant drama, the result is a curiously flat spectacle, neither offensive nor compelling.

Film Threat Rick Kisonak

Wolfgang Petersen's popcorn epic doesn't fail exactly. It just takes on too much. Modern man is at something of a disadvantage-even aided by his trusty muse, the computer-when presuming to bring the stuff of gods, myths and timeless sacred texts to the big screen.

Austin Chronicle Marc Savlov

Petersen, a director who knows his way around a crane shot better than almost anyone, rallies his troops but can't ignite his actors, and the end result is the sound and fury of Homer undone.

Salon.com Stephanie Zacharek

Troy isn't so much a simplified retelling of "The Iliad" as a re-imagined version of it, told wholly without imagination.

New York Post Jonathan Foreman

What really wrecks Wolfgang Petersen's Troy is some of the worst casting in recent Hollywood history: The lackluster ensemble hired by the director is overwhelmed by the generally impressive sets and crowd scenes, by the task of playing epic heroes and by David Benioff's rambling, tone-deaf screenplay "inspired by Homer's 'Iliad.'"

Wall Street Journal Joe Morgenstern

In Troy, and in overreaching, underachieving productions like it, digital imagery is fast becoming both a Trojan horse and Achilles' heel.

The Onion (A.V. Club) Keith Phipps

Troy does look good--so good, in fact, that it takes a while to reveal itself as a thundering dud with much action but little personality, human drama, or brains.

LA Weekly Scott Foundas

The thunderous clashes between armies of computer-generated Trojans and Mycenaeans, when they do arrive, feel decidedly un-epic, as though we were watching a child's toy-box war between plastic figurines. Which makes them perfectly in line with the rest of Petersen's artless approach.