Lone Survivor
Universal Pictures | Release Date: December 27, 2013 CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION
60
METASCORE
Mixed or average reviews based on 44 Critic Reviews
Positive:
28
Mixed:
12
Negative:
4
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Critic Reviews

Critic scorePublicationBy date
80
Arizona RepublicBill GoodykoontzJan 9, 2014
Berg immerses us so completely into the horror of these men’s situation that we are gripped throughout. The fighting is incredibly intense. Read full review
80
Wall Street JournalJoe MorgensternDec 28, 2013
All four performances are first-rate, and the action is staged with shattering intensity. Read full review
80
Los Angeles TimesBetsy SharkeyDec 24, 2013
Berg, who wrote and directed, is more interested in how men deal with battle than the ideals or the politics that put them there. What the movie achieves, with a gruesome energy and a remarkable reality, is a firefight. Read full review
75
ReelViewsJames BerardinelliJan 13, 2014
Most war films try to be epic in scope and intent. Lone Survivor opts for a smaller focus and succeeds on its own terms. Read full review
75
Philadelphia InquirerSteven ReaJan 10, 2014
The middle 40 minutes of Lone Survivor have to be some of the toughest battle scenes in Hollywood history - an epic, close-range firefight that finds the SEALs throwing themselves down rock faces like superheroes. Only they aren't superheroes - they bleed, they break. Read full review
75
Chicago Sun-TimesRichard RoeperJan 9, 2014
Lone Survivor is primarily about the unflinching bravery of SEALs executing their mission and looking out for one another, even as they’re coming to grips with the reality of how this thing is going to end. Read full review
75
Portland OregonianMarc MohanJan 9, 2014
The surprisingly thoughtful third act both introduces complexity to its portrayal of the Afghan people, and subtly reminds us that, despite Luttrell's astonishing constitution and self-surgery skills, as well as the ultimate sacrifices made by his comrades in arms, it was all for naught. Read full review
75
Rolling StonePeter TraversJan 9, 2014
Like the best war movies, Lone Survivor laces action with moral questions that haunt and provoke. Read full review
75
Chicago TribuneMichael PhillipsJan 9, 2014
Wahlberg remains one of our most reliable and least actorly of movie stars, innately macho but vulnerable enough to seem like a human being caught in an inhuman situation. Read full review
75
Tampa Bay TimesSteve PersallJan 9, 2014
Conveying a visceral sense of warfare's terror is what Berg chiefly seeks, and on that level Lone Survivor handily succeeds. Read full review
75
NPRElla TaylorDec 28, 2013
Berg is relentlessly unsparing. Read full review
75
USA TodayScott BowlesDec 28, 2013
Survivor is a pummeling, frenzied ride, one of fall's most charged action films. The gunfights and rocket-propelled grenades are palpable, and Berg manages to make the chaos followable. Read full review
75
The PlaylistCharlie SchmidlinNov 14, 2013
Together, all four cast members help draw a line across the narrative—separating when we were watching a mildly engaging depiction of names, dates, and locations, and a hellish, immersive situation with no easy outcome in sight. Read full review
70
SalonAndrew O'HehirJan 16, 2014
Lone Survivor has no politics in the sense that it presents a more or less factual story about Luttrell and his comrades trying to fight their way out against overwhelming odds, and tells the truth that most of them didn’t make it. But the visual symbolism and the iconography of this movie are not apolitical or ideologically neutral at all. Read full review
70
SalonAndrew O'HehirJan 16, 2014
That people want to see a competent action picture in the depths of winter isn’t all that depressing, but the fact that they’re swallowing the disgusting symbolism of this one definitely is. Read full review
70
The New YorkerDavid DenbyJan 6, 2014
Lone Survivor will not please people exasperated by an endless war, but it's an achievement nonetheless. [6 Jan. 2014, p. 73]
70
SlateDana StevensJan 4, 2014
Lone Survivor’s lack of suspense never works against it. If anything, the fact that the outcome is, at least roughly, known in advance only adds to the film’s sickening tension, the atmosphere of preordained doom through which its characters seem to move. Read full review
70
The New York TimesA.O. ScottDec 24, 2013
It is a modest, competent, effective movie, concerned above all with doing the job of explaining how the job was done. Read full review
70
The Hollywood ReporterTodd McCarthyDec 10, 2013
The film is rugged, skilled, relentless, determined, narrow-minded and focused, everything that a soldier must be when his life is on the line. Read full review
70
VarietyJustin ChangNov 14, 2013
Berg’s blunt, pummeling style offers few nuances and makes no apologies, but his broad brushstrokes have clearly found an ideal canvas in this grimly heroic rendering of hell on earth. Read full review
68
Film.comWilliam GossJan 14, 2014
Ultimately seems at war with itself, torn between its duties as an entertaining, engaging movie and a somber, sincere memorial, and in splitting the difference, the film effectively assaults its audience almost as aggressively as its subjects. Read full review
67
Christian Science MonitorPeter RainerJan 10, 2014
Not much depth or political examination here. The film works best as a survivalist’s manual. Read full review
67
Austin ChronicleMarjorie BaumgartenJan 8, 2014
Lone Survivor is a somber celebration of courage and endurance that manages to steer clear of jingoism and moral judgments. Read full review
67
Entertainment WeeklyChris NashawatyJan 8, 2014
Berg has made a powerful film and an important reminder of what really happens when we send men and women off to war. It's just too bad that subtlety isn't a stronger weapon in his arsenal. Read full review
67
The A.V. ClubA.A. Dowd Dec 24, 2013
For all his directorial shortcomings, Berg has a knack for capturing men at work; his depiction of special-ops maneuvering—of silently casing the enemy base, of planning the attack—is as compelling as the chaotic violence he orchestrates later. Read full review
63
The Globe and Mail (Toronto)Geoff PevereJan 9, 2014
This is a contemporary war-is-hell account in which hell burns so intensely that it scorches the firewalls of the mundane world around it. But it doesn’t burn them down. Read full review
63
Boston GlobeTy BurrJan 9, 2014
The actors are excellent, as are the bruising re-creations of the firefight and the uncountable injuries sustained. Read full review
63
McClatchy-Tribune News ServiceRoger MooreDec 24, 2013
The characters are only superficially sketched in, but we still fear for them, understand their code and above all else, appreciate the dirty, bloody, high-risk work these professionals do. That they go through all this and risk everything, by choice, is something Berg, to his credit, never lets us forget. Read full review
60
Total FilmKevin HarleyJan 29, 2014
The direction pummels and the cast impress, yet Berg’s war movie promises more than it delivers. Memories of Battleship are sunk, but that Oscar buzz may be a bit premature. Read full review
60
Time Out LondonAshley ClarkJan 28, 2014
Neither an anti-war tract nor a jingoistic rallying cry, the brutal but humane Lone Survivor instead registers as a howl of despair for so many young men and women lost in war. Read full review
60
EmpireJames DyerJan 27, 2014
A severe portrait of fortitude under extreme pressure, somewhat marred by blinkered politics. Read full review
60
New Orleans Times-PicayuneMike ScottJan 10, 2014
While Lone Survivor is presented as a piece of hero-focused entertainment, it is a suitably sobering one in the end, and a film that is bound to stick to the ribs of audiences longer than, say, your average Superman movie. Read full review
60
TimeRichard CorlissDec 25, 2013
You may salute Lone Survivor for its desperate intensity; but the film remains pinned down by its military and political dilemma: between gung-ho and F—, no. Read full review
50
San Francisco ChronicleMick LaSalleJan 9, 2014
Lone Survivor, from start to finish, is a tale of disaster, of bad luck and bad communication, perhaps even faulty planning, though that's hard to say. So the movie loses the common touch of average folk trying to get by, while also losing some of the pleasure of watching a crack unit at work. Read full review
50
RogerEbert.comSteven BooneDec 25, 2013
Lone Survivor burns with the fever of a passion project. Writer-director Peter Berg's gratitude to United States servicemen for all their sacrifice comes through viscerally, from first frame to last. Read full review
50
IndieWireEric KohnDec 23, 2013
Lone Survivor is a grotesque action movie at times impressively directed by Peter Berg that combines the brute masculinity with the ugliness of the battlefield and viscerally unsettling shock value. But it's less a depiction of courage than a brutish magnification of anger and pain, both of which it conveys a lot better than the high ground that it reaches for. Read full review
50
The DissolveNoel MurrayDec 23, 2013
The simplicity of Lone Survivor eventually becomes a handicap, because after a certain point, the film becomes just one long battle sequence, lacking narrative ebb and flow. Read full review
50
New York PostKyle SmithDec 19, 2013
There hasn’t been this bizarre mixture of hooah and death since John Wayne hung up his combat boots. Read full review
40
New York Magazine (Vulture)David EdelsteinJan 13, 2014
Crudely written, rife with clichés, and leaves out anything that would transform a piece of propaganda into a work of art akin to Samuel Fuller’s "The Steel Helmet," Brian DePalma’s "Casualties of War," or Steven Spielberg’s "Saving Private Ryan." Read full review
40
New York Daily NewsElizabeth WeitzmanDec 28, 2013
Peter Berg’s ultra-bloody battle film “Lone Survivor” is ultimately more grueling than satisfying. It’s more carnage than cinema. Read full review
38
Slant MagazineSteve MacfarlaneDec 10, 2013
Like his prior "The Kingdom," Peter Berg's film pretends to dabble in a frothy moral ambiguity, swiftly betraying its true aims with trigger-happy jingoism. Read full review
37
Washington PostMichael O'SullivanJan 9, 2014
What’s missing here is something, or rather, someone, to care about. Read full review
30
Village VoiceAmy NicholsonDec 24, 2013
Lone Survivor just reads like a quasi-political exaggeration of a slasher film: the cellphones that don't work, the rescuers just out of reach, the killers chasing our victims through the woods. Read full review
20
Time OutKeith UhlichDec 18, 2013
Berg may be adhering to the basic facts, but his movie’s childish machismo is a disgrace to all involved. Read full review
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