58
Despite Bibi’s need for speed, Racer And The Jailbird sputters more than it guns.
What are people saying?
What are critics saying?
50
The Hollywood Reporter by Boyd van Hoeij
Schoenaerts is his usual, intense self, Exarchopoulos has here found her best role since Blue and there’s no denying their chemistry is wild. But their characters become prisoners of the many twists and turns of the narrative instead of rising above it; their personalities aren’t revealed through the story so much as they are constrained by it.
40
CineVue by Christopher Machell
Racer and the Jailbird is a stylish, often promising film, but sadly one that never coheres into genuine drama.
38
The film comes to concern a selfless martyr before morphing, most absurdly, into a disease-of-the-week tearjerker.
50
Racer and the Jailbird speeds along at an engaging clip, but never overcomes the fundamental simplicity of its plot.
60
Screen International by Fionnuala Halligan
An indulgent 130-minute running time and a plot that wildly over-stretches sees Racer ultimately bounce off the rails.
50
The New York Times by Jeannette Catsoulis
The two leads are sensational, but the movie, drained of its life force and stuffed with confusing plot complications — like a shoehorned-in undercover agent and some mysterious Albanians — never recovers.
83
One of the most undersung and most potent pleasures of genre cinema is the excuse it has given us, time and again, to watch attractive people fall in love with each other, and if you’re in a romantic frame of mind, Racer and the Jailbird delivers so wholly on that front that it goes a fair way toward compensating for the film’s deficiencies elsewhere.
60
Los Angeles Times by Noel Murray
Racer and the Jailbird remains absorbing throughout, thanks primarily to the two leads, who are both almost frighteningly believable as lovers willing to risk everything to stay together.
60
The whole thing becomes drenched in a kind of downbeat sentimental martyrdom that feels oppressively old-fashioned and moribund.