- Critic Score
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88If Martin Scorsese were 30 and a Los Angeleno, he'd be making movies much like this one.
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83Bale is mesmerizing and Rodriguez keeps up with him as the whole unsafe contraption zooms.
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75Not since "To Live and Die in L.A" has there been such a raw, cynical vision of living and dying in L.A.
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75Bale brings intense energy (and a convincing American accent) to the proceedings, and the film manages to make this borderline Travis Bickle into a sympathetic character - with a sweetheart, and a sweeter life, beckoning from south of the border. Strong stuff.
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75All along, you know something terrible is going to happen, and when it does, you leave the theater shaken and deeply moved.
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75With his ersatz-gangsta swagger, the once-again buff Bale gives it his all -- he's got to be the most committed actor in Hollywood -- but the real surprise here is Rodriguez, who has all the talent and charisma of a major star.
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75Harsh Times occasionally echoes "Taxi Driver," Ayer's own "Training Day," and even "First Blood" in the way it examines the psychological disintegration of a character and the seduction of amorality.
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70Debuting as director, Ayer once again points his loose cannon directly into the body politic: the protagonist of this sour but haunting tale is a crazed army ranger just returned from overseas (Christian Bale) who's so full of war that even the LAPD won't hire him.
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Rodríguez is excellent as Mike.
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67Ayer gets lost in a maze of ironies, and has to bulldoze his way to an exit. For a while, Harsh Times is thrillingly hard to predict. By the end, it becomes all too easy.
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63Harsh Times, is almost a good, salty urban thriller.
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63Harsh Times opens with a deadly nightmare and ends with a vast bloodbath -- in between, things get a little gruesome.
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60A psychotic seizure of a performance by Christian Bale dominates Harsh Times, the directorial debut of David Ayer that channels "Taxi Driver."
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58Well-intentioned but not very well directed, it makes for a better psychological profile than a film.
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58For most of its meandering running time Harsh Times is just a rough South Central L.A. buddy movie.
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50The film's unrelenting bleakness and misanthropic tone is likely to be a turnoff to mainstream performances, but it provides its lead actor with another opportunity to display his riveting intensity.
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50The result is an angry, violent mess of a movie with a central character threatening to implode right on the screen.
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50Give Harsh Times an "E" for effort, but not much else.
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Harsh Times goes down like the vinegar its protagonist chugs to try to beat a drug test. It's carefully crafted, exasperating and ugly, a festival of self-destructiveness, in all ways a reflection of its lead as brought to careening, erupting, implosive life by Christian Bale.
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50Mr. Bales's spectacular technical performance of a toxic bad boy on the fast track to hell somehow lacks an inner core.
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Whatever political statement Ayer intended to make with his Gulf War veteran turned human time bomb is swamped by the movie's obnoxious badass envy, and Bale's gloating display of American-psycho fireworks, the kind of vein-popping show-boating that might as well be performed in a mirror.
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40The film amounts to a harsh and perpetual assault on viewers' sensibilities -- not only because of its violence but because of its overall bleakness.
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38The real problem with Harsh Times is Jim himself. Bale goes at the part with his usual intensity, but the character still seems like a psycho without psychology or a soul.
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38Harsh Times contains exactly 30 seconds of novelty.
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User score distribution:
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Positive: 9 out of 12
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Mixed: 0 out of 12
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Negative: 3 out of 12
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10
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Kyle10Better than Training Day... Narc was a little better but Bale owned this film.
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SimonMarts10