Into the Wild
Paramount Vantage | Release Date: September 21, 2007 CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION
73
METASCORE
Generally favorable reviews based on 38 Critic Reviews
Positive:
30
Mixed:
8
Negative:
0
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Critic Reviews

Critic scorePublicationBy date
60
The Hollywood ReporterSura Wood
Penn opts for epic proportions and clutters his narrative with gimmicks. For the most part, it works. What's missing is the perspective and insight that would illuminated the inner dimensions of a driven young man who is preachy and downright irritating. Read full review
60
SalonStephanie Zacharek
If nature -- if life -- is as wild and precious as the movie makes it out to be, Hirsch needs to give us something, someone, to watch on-screen. We need to feel a presence before we can take the measure of an absence. Read full review
50
New York Magazine (Vulture)David Edelstein
With all the narration and fits of slow motion, the movie seems like the work of a nervous chain-smoker. It lacks concentration--and with it, the potential for rapture. Read full review
50
NewsweekDavid Ansen
Penn's eye for landscapes is stunning, and his affection for outsider lifestyles is tangible. Hirsch, who carries the film on his increasingly emaciated shoulders, performs heroically, but there's an edge missing. The ideal casting would have been the young Sean Penn. Read full review
50
TimeRichard Schickel
I think the central mistake of this film derives from its lack of irony, a sense it refuses to impart that the world may not be exactly as the zealous Christopher perceives it to be. The film needs at least to entertain the possibility that its protagonist was driven less by high principle than by lamentable screwiness. And we need to leave it carrying some sense of tragic consequence with us. Instead, we're simply glad to be finished, at last, with this annoying man-child. Read full review
50
SlateDana Stevens
It's hard not to feel that Penn is stacking the deck heavily in his favor and losing out on the chance for a more sober meditation on the ambiguity of McCandless' quest. Read full review
50
Chicago ReaderAndrea Gronvall
A murky screenplay leaves most of the humans ciphers, save for Hal Holbrook in an exquisitely calibrated performance as the avuncular desert retiree whose advice McCandless should have heeded. Read full review
50
The New YorkerDavid Denby
Sean Penn’s Into the Wild is certainly visual--it’s entirely too visual, to the point of being cheaply lyrical. Read full review
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