60
Suckers for romance likely won’t complain, but this Josh Hartnett time-travel epic is nuts.
What are people saying?
What are critics saying?
30
The New York Times by Ben Kenigsberg
[An] inert, exasperatingly proportioned phantasmagoria from Roland Joffé.
12
Slant Magazine by Clayton Dillard
A shamelessly derivative and preposterous would-be blockbuster that goofily fashions itself as a sweeping romance, time-travel sci-fi tale, and gallant period piece all at once.
20
Forget that The Lovers doesn’t have the courtesy to be fun; no cosmic romance should be so deeply afraid to shoot for the stars. As one of the film’s many forgettable characters so eloquently puts it, “This stinks worse than an oyster’s fart.”
25
The scenic cinematography by Ben Nott is often beautiful, which distracts, at times, from the fact that the storyline is both convoluted in the most gratuitous way possible and that it’s enacted in the most unengaging way imaginable.
30
Bring a notebook and some tissues — the mission to protect the queen becomes a tangle of shifting alliances between local and British forces that might require visual aids, while the snail-slow realization of gloomy prophecies may well tear you up in boredom.
30
Los Angeles Times by Michael Rechtshaffen
There's a veil of artifice clinging to every aspect of The Lovers, a thoroughly unconvincing time-traveling epic costume drama pairing a miscast Josh Hartnett and Bollywood beauty Bipasha Basu.
0
An idiotic bore called The Lovers has so little connection with anything professional that it’s hard to believe it was written and helmed by the same man. It’s so deadly and unintentionally funny (I hope) that it practically defies description.