40
Doesn't ring true as a love story between a cocky scam artist and a clever biology student, despite a game effort by Charlotte Ayanna in an impossible role and Adrien Brody at his loosest.
What are people saying?
What are critics saying?
70
Their relationship is so subtly inflected with fear, envy, and self-loathing on both sides of the class divide that I was drawn in nonetheless. Brody is a compelling presence throughout.
40
Wall Street Journal by Joe Morgenstern
None of it is enough, though, to save this glum drama from its schematic self.
40
Village Voice by Laura Sinagra
If this adaptation of Chinese punk-lit writer Wang Shuo's fiction doesn't survive its Bronx trick-out, you can't really blame Brody, whose luminous autodidact seems caught between camp and coolsville.
58
Entertainment Weekly by Lisa Schwarzbaum
Adrien Brody completists will appreciate Love the Hard Way, if only as an example of the kind of self-conscious, brat-noir projects their man probably won't be doing anymore.
50
Wildly uneven romantic drama.
40
Austin Chronicle by Marjorie Baumgarten
Although Love the Hard Way is saturated with a doomed romanticism that feels more fictitious than real, the actors lend the movie a potency that it would not have had otherwise.
25
Rolling Stone by Peter Travers
To shine in a turd like this shows Brody has the stuff that -- damn the Oscar jinx -- makes an actor last.
75
Chicago Sun-Times by Roger Ebert
Not perfect; a vice cop played by Pam Grier is oddly conceived and unlikely in action, and the movie doesn't seem to know how to end. But as character studies of Jack and Claire, it is daring and inventive, and worthy of comparison with the films of a French master of criminal psychology like Jean-Pierre Melville.
50
The film's final scenes are among its silliest, unfortunately.