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Writers Kirk Ellis and Michelle Ashford do justice to McCullough's narration, and director Tom Hooper has a straightforward style that gives flesh-and-blood dimension to names from history books. Best of all are two extraordinary performances at the center: Paul Giamatti as Adams and Laura Linney as his wife, Abigail.
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100Credit for building drama goes to screenwriter Kirk Ellis ("Into the West") and actor Paul Giamatti ("Sideways"). His intellectual, vain Adams is a reluctant rebel, tentative in his support of an American revolution, wary of insurgency and mob rule and defender of the tenets of American democracy.
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100It manages to be a rousing piece of filmmaking, a fascinating character study and a largely accurate presentation of the time when America was born.
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Who says TV doesn't make history thought-provokingly exciting?
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90A rich, intelligent and often moving miniseries.
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90The monumental production is worth bragging about.
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90John Adams, based on David McCullough's acclaimed biography, is as sumptuous and satisfying as TV gets: gorgeously produced, marvelously acted and written with a sense of high drama amid generous displays of wit.
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90John Adams is the kind of classily intelligent production that can be happily recommended to everybody. The filmmakers, including executive producer Tom Hanks, have attempted to re-create and enliven history--and they succeed grandly.
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90This handsome miniseries is praiseworthy on many levels--as history, as entertainment and as a way to bring to life for new generations a sense of the sacrifice and heroism needed to establish the U.S.
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90John Adams, a $100 million-plus production about the life and times of America's second president, is one of the most compelling miniseries of the decade.
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80We're in excellent company, from the Boston Massacre to the Declaration of Independence to Adams's plenipotentiary missions to Versailles and the Court of St. James to his unsought but extremely gratifying vice-presidency in the first Washington administration.
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80Both the book and the miniseries sketch admirably human portraits of historical figures such as Adams, Jefferson and Franklin.
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80Ellis has used Adams' works to create a wondrously full and nuanced portrait of the man, which is brought fully to life by Paul Giamatti.
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80It is not an exaggeration to say that the effect is of opening a treasure chest and being showered with its riches.
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80It is reverent enough, and profoundly heroic; and yet it is a living, breathing piece of work that brings American history down to earth.
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While John Adams succeeds as entertainment, it utterly fails as a history lesson.
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75Though the miniseries represents a compressed and not entirely accurate history, it is moving enough to remind us of the sacrifices made by Adams and a great many other people to form a republic against almost impossible odds.
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70The production, based on David McCullough's biography, unfolds as a lavish, sometimes stilted history lesson. The private story of the Adams family is more intriguing and fresh.
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70Ben Franklin (Tom Wilkinson ) enlivens the painterly prettiness and dutiful solemnity of John Adams with a healthy sense of the vulgar, as in the vernacular, as in the native voice of America.
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70The adaptation is meticulous almost to a fault, including a fidelity to language and accents (a hybrid between British and American) that initially appears to handcuff some of the cast --beginning, most glaringly, with Giamatti, fresh off his turn as a jollier icon in "Fred Claus."
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At its best, the storytelling itself manages to accommodate a sense of historical contingency.
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70Far from epic, John Adams is a biopic as intense and moody as the man himself.
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63Sadly, in this elaborately produced, incredibly well-intentioned seven-part HBO miniseries adaptation of the book, Adams recedes once again, outshone not just by his more famous peers but also by just about every minor character.
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60John Adams is the weakest part of John Adams.
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50But this is an epic drama on HBO, correct? So is it Giamatti or Adams himself who will make viewers wish for a swifter and less pedantic version on the History Channel?
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50Unfortunately, so smitten are the creators of John Adams with historical earnestness and pedigree they seem to have forgotten how to tell a good story.
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50There are moments when John Adams stirs up the passion its author clearly had for the subject -- Adams firing off a rifle in the middle of a battle at sea with a British warship, the first public reading of the Declaration, George Washington (David Morse, in the second-best piece of casting other than Giamatti) whispering his oath of office at his inauguration -- but too often it's just as muddy and dull as its subject was accused of being.
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User score distribution:
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Positive: 59 out of 70
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Mixed: 5 out of 70
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Negative: 6 out of 70
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