The Bounty

Orion Pictures | Release Date: May 4, 1984

CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION

62	METASCORE Generally favorable reviews based on 11 Critic Reviews

Positive:

Mixed:

Negative:

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Critic Reviews

Critic score Publication By date

The GuardianAlex Von Tunzelmann

The Bounty has an incredible cast and a fabulously well-put-together production, and pays impressive attention to historical accuracy – more than any of the previous cinematic recreations. With all this going for it, it's a pity that the drama falls flat. Read full review

EmpireIan Nathan

Film is elegant but never beautiful, a pretence at Lean’s magnificence contradicted by a lavish but anachronistic score by Vangelis. It is the words and performances which excite; their director is out of his depth. Read full review

David Ansen

Though The Bounty is almost willfully perverse in thwarting audience expectations, and though it ends anticlimactically, you can't dismiss it. You know you've seen something. A spell, however faint, has been cast, like the one the island casts on the Bounty's crew. [14 May 1984, p.81]

Pauline Kael

Based on a script condensed from Robert Bolt's scripts for two projected films about the 1789 mutiny, this misshapen movie doesn't work as an epic -- it doesn't have the scope or the emotional surge of epic storytelling. It's certainly not boring, though.

Geoff Andrew

It's all a brave try, though Gibson is perhaps not up to the demands of a Christian's progress from naive rating to self-loathing exile, and Donaldson's direction often verges on the stolid. Read full review

Gary Arnold

Like so many modern movies, The Bounty appears interesting and even spellbinding when preoccupied with settings and textures, but maddeningly obtuse when obliged to clarify basic dramatic conflicts. [17 May 1984, p.E8]

Vincent Canby

The movie seems to have been planned, written, acted, shot and edited by people who were constantly being overruled by other people. It's totally lifeless. Read full review