Metacritic Film

Ten Commandments, The

Starring Ben Kingsley, Christian Slater, Alfred Molina, and Elliott Gould

MPAA RATING: PG for some mild peril

Promenade Pictures
Animation
88 minutes | Color
USA
Released In Theaters October 19, 2007

Condemned to die by Pharaoh while just a baby, Hebrew Moses is set adrift on the River Nile by his mother and his sister. Rescued by the daughter of Pharaoh, he grows up thinking he's an Egyptian prince. Eventually exiled from Egypt when he is exposed as a Jew, he is touched by God, and told that he will lead his enslaved Chosen People to the Promised Land. With the hand of God firmly on his shoulder, and with faith as his only weapon, Moses performs miracles, casts down plagues, evades a pursuing Egyptian army, parts the Red Sea and, after forty years of leading the Hebrew Chosen Ones to the Promised Land, is embraced by God and led to a better place. (Promenade Pictures)

WRITTEN BY
Ed Naha

DIRECTED BY
Bill Boyce
John Stronach

Overall Metascore

This is a weighted, normalized average of all individual scores given by critics, on a scale of 0 (worst) to 100 (best).

25 / 100

Critic Reviews

75 Chicago Tribune Louis R. Carlozo
For those who recall those old Classics Illustrated comics of the 1940s and ’50s--and even for those who don’t--there’s an endearing, earnest quality to The Ten Commandments that transcends its star-studded cast and computer-generated animation.
50 Variety
A well-intentioned misfire featuring 3-D CGI animation that recalls lesser vidgames of the mid-1990s.
42 Seattle Post-Intelligencer Andy Spletzer
Bad animation and casting make Moses movie a zero, not a Ten.
30 Chicago Reader
The panoramic backgrounds have a silky beauty, but the characters are cheaply rendered with doll faces, enlarged musculature, tiny joints, and clunky movement. It's like watching Max Headroom lead his people out of Egypt.
30 Austin Chronicle
There’s something earnest and forthright about the movie, despite its misguided execution.
0 The Onion (A.V. Club)
It fails on every conceivable level.

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