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63It's a depressing story made even more of a downer by the absence of any Stones-performed music from their prime '60s years.
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63The good news here is that Woolley and his writers have taken the mystery surrounding Jones' tragic 1969 death as their main interest, and have adopted as fact the long-cherished rumor that the blond rocker's drowning was a case of murder. It may be speculative history, but at least it's a story.
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Stoned carries a freaked-out buzz of nostalgia for the era when celebs willfully destroyed themselves for our amusement.
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63Newcomer Gregory never captures the mercurial charisma for which Jones was famous (and which Jagger notoriously channeled in his movie debut, "Performance"), without which his story is just another cautionary tale about fast times, intemperate passions and bad dope.
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60A must for any true rock aficionado.
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50A clichéd rock-star film.
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50Thorogood allegedly confessed on his deathbed (in 1993) that he killed Jones, and while the movie convinces us that this might have happened, it never truly reveals who Brian Jones was before he fell apart. His indulgence, and his demise, play out in a void.
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50The soundtrack is a mess, with period music out of sync with the period, as when the 1967 song, "White Rabbit," underscores a 1965 acid trip.
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50Despite good performances from Gregory, Considine and especially David Morrissey, the movie's true merits are all on the surface: its uncannily authentic period reconstruction and its successful use of stressed and textured film stocks. The filmmakers care more about this than about their characters, and it's hard for us not to feel the same.
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50Its title may ring with pun and promise, but Stoned is a flat riff on Jones's short life. You'll get the highlights but no sense of what made him special -- or what really haunted him.
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42Apart from Considine, the actors all deliver superficial performances beneath several layers of slathered-on Summer Of Love drag, and Woolley's use of multiple film stocks and flash-cut editing jumbles together a bunch of '60s filmmaking clichés without putting them to any particular use.
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40What we really need from Stoned, the very thing that it fails to give us, is a sense of Jones as a human being.
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40Fans of the band will likely be disappointed (its music is represented by a handful of covers), and younger audiences will wonder what the fuss is about.
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40Stoned accomplishes the unlikely feat of making the golden years before medical science and the law caught up with rock culture look dull.
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40The film's sputtering dramatic engine, underwhelming perfs, and absence of music by the Stones themselves may leave the key younger demographic wondering what all the fuss is about.
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40This UK drama by Stephen Woolley, a longtime producer for Neil Jordan making his directing debut, presents a fairly convincing version of what might have happened.
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38Glaringly lacking in the film are any original Stones songs. The group, who fired Jones just before his death, must not have thought much of the movie if they didn't allow their music to be used. Smart fellows.
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38All the pieces are in place for an incisive tale of Brit-pop ego and madness, but filmmaker Stephen Woolley -- a celebrated UK producer ("The Crying Game") making his directing debut -- lets the story get away from him.
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30A disappointingly dreary affair.
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30The rock hero starts out dead and so does the movie.
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25Could 1960s-style sex, drugs and rock & roll really have been this dull?
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Almost so bad it's good. Almost.
User score distribution:
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Positive: 1 out of 3
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Mixed: 0 out of 3
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Negative: 2 out of 3
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JohnP.2
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MapP.7Worth a look, better than I was expecting.
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WillC.3Really a super boring and dull movie. No Rolling Stones music either. I would avoid this one.