Fahrenheit 451

There’s enough good, though, especially in Jordan’s performance, to recommend “Fahrenheit 451,” but it’s not the slam-dunk you’d expect of a prestigious adaptation of a great American novel. The end result, with all its eels and OMNIS and emojis, is just too affected--and indeed, somehow too futuristic.

While the three leads' performances are excellent, particularly Michael Shannon as Captain Beatty, the cast of Fahrenheit 451 gets shortchanged by the film format.

Shannon’s venomous glares and cinderblock grins only elicit the faintest shiver of dread. The actor’s failure to supply a proper freak-out goes toward the tepidness of this Fahrenheit, which has a real feel of about fifty-eight. ... The more interesting romance in the film is between Montag and Beatty. ... The quick sketch of the machismo of fascism makes a searing impression.

As a story, it holds together well enough, if a bit too neatly. Even if you haven’t read the book, there’s a lack of urgency to the film because it fits so snugly into generic expectations.

The world of Fahrenheit 451 is often more interesting than the film itself, which, after a brisk start, gets bogged down by sluggish pacing and a confusing new addition involving DNA storage.

Proving you can't judge a book -- or movie -- by its cover, "Fahrenheit 451" turns out to be considerably less than the sum of its parts. Featuring the tantalizing tandem of Michael B. Jordan and Michael Shannon, this HBO movie adaptation of Ray Bradbury's dystopian novel grinds along sluggishly, eclipsed by similar visions ("The Handmaid's Tale," anyone?) and becoming one of those films that, alas, looked better on paper.

There's nothing to distinguish Fahrenheit other than the fire imagery. And it's not much of a pleasure to watch the movie burn.

A disappointing adaptation that offers a new ending, when the old one worked just fine.

Fahrenheit 451 has its highs and lows. But you will walk away wanting to read a physical book, and maybe embrace it for a few moments beforehand.

Fahrenheit 451 connects those dots in clumsy, obvious ways, augmenting its chintzy, budget world-of-tomorrow with emoji and livestreams and Alexa anxiety. What the film fails to do, most critically, is dramatize the intellectual awakening of true believer Guy Montag (Michael B. Jordan), whose growing, secret love affair with the written word remains completely abstract.

A disappointing film that can’t seem to rise above room temperature.

The result is a story boiled down to a husk, a simplistic statement enacted by one-note characters whose internal conflicts--when they exist--are underexplored. ... Jordan, however, is the redeeming factor in the HBO movie.

[The new Fahrenheit 451] is generic, its critique muddled and its tone as subtle as a flamethrower.

After a potent start, director/co-writer Ramin Bahrani’s updated take on Bradbury’s cautionary tale becomes less credible as it develops and ultimately suffers from some fundamental creative missteps that leave it unconvincing in the final stretch.

Bahrani renders reading passive without any sense of irony, reducing books to a bland MacGuffin. Unsurprisingly, Bahrani fashions a classic into a futuristic chase film with endless torrents of exposition, which represents every culturally bastardizing tendency it pretends to decry.

No one expects in a 21st-century film version, an hour and a half in length, anything approaching the subtlety and character that went into Bradbury’s novel. Still one might have asked--of a film titled “Fahrenheit 451”--for more than a one-note rant.

This Fahrenheit 451 too often feels like an emojified version of its source material, cutting off anything more complex than an easy picture. Spend the time with a good book instead.