- Network: HBO
- Series Premiere Date: May 21, 2016
Critic Reviews
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As was the case with the similarly middling “Confirmation,” here, a host of male character actors get a reasonable amount of screen time, but few make a lasting impression. That’s partly due to the nature of the film’s dialogue, which is often predictable and packed with dutiful exposition.
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The film's first hour focuses on the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and despite sometimes embellishing and distorting the actual events for no particular reason, it's a fast-moving portrait of legislative brinkmanship, political pragmatism and altruistic ambition. ... In its second hour, though, All the Way becomes an underexamined Wikipedia entry.
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The film version of Cranston's LBJ only comes to life when he's listening to other characters or silently brooding to himself (while voice-over narration articulates his fears and doubts); otherwise he's a Madam Tussaud's waxworks LBJ that can move and speak, a testament to latex craftsmanship and the careful study of newsreels. The bigger his LBJ is in this film, the less credible and interesting he is.
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Unfortunately, there are also a lot of epically failed moments as well, almost all of them related to Schenkkan’s script, which paradoxically tries to cover too much while delivering too little. Instead of focusing exclusively on the battle over the civil rights bill, he tries to fold in the entire year of 1964, which included everything from the Gulf of Tonkin naval incident that launched full-scale American intervention in Vietnam to the arrest of a key Johnson aide caught performing a homosexual act in a public restroom weeks before the election that threatened (or so the president feared, anyway) to destroy his campaign.
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All The Way is passable, even lively at moments, but it’s also calcified by its repetitive, bloated discussions about the rights and wrongs of the civil rights movement and, more importantly, the two-party system of American government. The best lines go to Cranston, who clearly relishes the language, candor, and physicality of his character in every frame in which he appears, but beyond him, there’s no real sense of the conflictive character that denotes these real-life figures.
Awards & Rankings
User score distribution:
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Positive: 35 out of 45
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Mixed: 4 out of 45
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Negative: 6 out of 45
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May 21, 2016
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May 25, 2016
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May 22, 2016