70
On the one hand a captivating and inspiring tale of a boy's journey to courage amid searing injustice, pic often gives way to scenes of intense violence that are likely to bludgeon the very sensibilities it seeks to awaken.
What are people saying?
What are critics saying?
60
Crude, patronising and mawkish, but rescued by excellent performances, beautiful landscape photography, and hard-to-argue-with themes of natural justice, delivered with a punch.
30
The New York Times by Janet Maslin
The film's facile treatment of racial issues may be enough to bring back the practice of throwing tomatoes at the screen.
50
Reducing the racist characters to the level of frothing-at-the-mouth Karate Kid villains doesn't shed much light on a serious social problem. (Louis Malle's portrait of the young Gestapo member in the 1974 Lacombe, Lucien came much closer to exposing the banality of evil.) And Avildsen doesn't make matters any better by staging scenes of racial violence so luridly that they almost amount to a form of exploitation.
50
Los Angeles Times by Kenneth Turan
Seeing a movie that doesn’t know the meaning of shameless, that refuses to worry about plausibility, that acts as if subtlety hadn’t been invented yet, does have a very basic kind of intrinsically cinematic pull.
20
Austin Chronicle by Marjorie Baumgarten
Avildsen is a master at pulling populist heartstrings, Johnny Clegg provides the African music which is so essential to the movie's plot and the panoramic shots of the veldt are frequently breathtaking. But these things alone do not a good movie make.
25
Entertainment Weekly by Owen Gleiberman
The Power of One spends so much screen time reveling in the eloquence and bravery of its hero and depicting South Africa’s blacks as an anonymous horde of victims that the film, in effect, becomes their victimizer.
30
Rolling Stone by Peter Travers
A violent cartoon that trivializes apartheid. If there's any justice, the birds of loneliness will be circling the box office.
50
Washington Post by Rita Kempley
An absorbing but awkward union of the two-fisted boxing movie with the moist-eyed British memoir...Though rife with worthy intentions and great notions, this populist safari manages to be both patronizing and manipulative.
63
Chicago Sun-Times by Roger Ebert
How can you forgive a movie that begins by asking you to care who will win freedom, and ends by asking you to care who will win a fight?