0
So incompetently mounted by Brazilian director Vicente Amorim (it takes a clumsy directorial hand to make Viggo Mortensen come on like Sesame Street's Mr. Noodle) as to be utterly incoherent.
What are people saying?
What are critics saying?
70
Good demonstrates the surprising power of character flaws in drama. How else to explain that the portrayal of a good man who does nothing in Good should prove more dramatically compelling than the stories in "Valkyrie" and "Defiance" of good men who did good?
50
Though the film opens with an intriguing burnished look, it bogs down about halfway through with talkiness and uneven pacing.
40
Considering its theme and setting, there's something very wrong with a Good that seems merely competent, uninspired and a bit old-hat.
40
New York Daily News by Elizabeth Weitzman
An uncharacteristically stiff Mortensen can't break free from the clichés that constrain his character, who feels more like a symbol than a real person.
50
ReelViews by James Berardinelli
Viggo Mortensen looks the part but never brings it home with great conviction or passion. I never believed in the character and that greatly diminished the film's ability to argue its ethical case.
50
It's an old-fashioned hoke-fest, in which the otherness of Germany is connoted by having everyone speak with a British accent.
70
The Hollywood Reporter by Ray Bennett
Paced deliberately in a way that reinforces the tragedy of evil flourishing when good men do nothing, Good may find boxoffice returns slow to build but the film's aim is true and patient audiences will be well rewarded.
20
The New York Times by Stephen Holden
In Good, the anemic screen adaptation of C. P. Taylor's play about a respectable "good German" who passively acquiesces to Hitler's agenda, Viggo Mortensen, miscast and ineptly directed by Vicente Amorim, plays John Halder, a liberal, mild-mannered literature professor who becomes a Nazi.