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Battle in Seattle
Metascore
54 out of 100

Mixed or average reviews - based on 17 Critics

Critic score distribution:
  1. Positive: 7 out of 17
  2. Mixed: 8 out of 17
  3. Negative: 2 out of 17
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  1. Entertainment Weekly
    Reviewed by: Owen Gleiberman
    91
    His (Townsend) staging has a tumult, a multi-POV immediacy that brings to mind Paul Greengrass' "Bloody Sunday."
  2. Chicago Sun-Times
    Reviewed by: Roger Ebert
    75
    The result is not quite a documentary and not quite a drama, but interesting all the same. It uses the approach of Haskell Wexler's "Medium Cool" (1969), but without the same urgency.
  3. TV Guide
    Reviewed by: Ken Fox
    75
    What the film lacks in artistry it makes up for in commitment.
  4. The A.V. Club
    Reviewed by: Tasha Robinson
    75
    It's the next best thing to being there, in that it's likely to make shuddering viewers intensely glad that they weren't.
  5. The Hollywood Reporter
    Reviewed by: Kirk Honeycutt
    70
    While it makes no bones about where its sympathies lie, these fictional stories show a genuine fascination with the role politics plays on both sides of such confrontations and how things can spin out of control with no single person to blame.
  6. Chicago Reader
    Reviewed by: Joshua Katzman
    70
    Absorbing docudrama.
  7. Seattle Post-Intelligencer
    Reviewed by: Sean Axmaker
    67
    Is it too much to ask that the fictional scenes have at least some of the complexity and unpredictability of the real-life theater?
  8. Variety
    Reviewed by: Dennis Harvey
    60
    Picture's ambition, cogency and decent performances make up for its uneven aspects. Woody Harrelson has some especially good moments as a cop.
  9. New York Post
    Reviewed by: Lou Lumenick
    50
    In his directing debut Battle in Seattle, actor Stuart Towns end does an impressive job (on a shoestring budget) of re-creating the massive street protests that forced the cancellation of the World Trade Organization summit in 1999.
  10. San Francisco Chronicle
    Reviewed by: Reyhan Harmanci
    50
    Getting an inside view on events is fascinating enough to carry the movie.
  11. Boston Globe
    Reviewed by: Ty Burr
    50
    The chief culprits are Townsend's TV-movie characterizations and a very muddled message.
  12. The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
    Reviewed by: Liam Lacey
    50
    Near the end of the movie, Django jokes that, after the protests, people may still not know what the WTO is, but "they know it's bad." That's a fair summation of how much insight Battle in Seattle provides for its viewers.
  13. Village Voice
    Reviewed by: J. Hoberman
    50
    Flapping like a scarecrow in the wind, Battle in Seattle is too frantic to make more than a transitory impression, yet too responsibly hackneyed in its characterizations to achieve pure tabloid hysteria.
  14. Los Angeles Times
    Reviewed by: Kenneth Turan
    50
    Townsend's sincerity, his admiration for the idealism of the people behind the anti-WTO protests, is never in doubt, but combining drama with historical re-creation is frankly a challenge his filmmaking skills are not up to.
  15. The New York Times
    Reviewed by: Stephen Holden
    50
    A drama is only as convincing as its characters. The people awkwardly forced together in Battle in Seattle are rhetorical mouthpieces tied to the sketchy plotlines of a so-so Hollywood ensemble movie.
  16. Washington Post
    Reviewed by: John Anderson
    30
    It's a movie by a true believer in anti-globalization, and it may win a few converts, but not among devotees of convincing, capable cinema.
  17. New York Daily News
    Reviewed by: Joe Neumaier
    20
    Well-intentioned but as earnest as a college freshman discovering campus politics.
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