‘Man Down’ and Out: Shia LaBeouf Drama Scores Zero Percent on Rotten Tomatoes

War movie directed by Dito Montiel also stars Kate Mara and Gary Oldman

man down
Lionsgate

Oops — Shia LaBeouf’s new movie, “Man Down,” literally cannot fall any lower with critics — three days ahead of its release, the film currently has a score of 0 percent on Rotten Tomatoes.

While critics are praising LaBeouf’s performance, they are describing the film as a “clumsy experiment” directed by Dito Montiel.

“‘Man Down ‘turns out to be – by turns – uninteresting, treacly and chock full of war-movie cliches,” wrote The Guardian’s Andrew Pulver, while New York Daily News writer Allen Salkin says that “walking out of the theater comes as an unbridled relief.”

“Man Down” also stars Jai Courtney, Gary Oldman, Kate Mara, Tory Kittles and Clifton Collins Jr. It follows U.S. Marine Gabriel Drummer (LaBeouf) who returns home from his tour in Afghanistan to find another battlefield at home.

The film opens on Dec. 2, so there is still room for the Rotten Tomatoes score to change.

See 7 terrible reviews below.

Allen Salkin, New York Daily News:
“I just don’t think that I can recommend a lot of people spend an hour and a half sitting through this exercise. In ‘The Deer Hunter,’ a great film about many things including PTSD, there are scenes with barely an English word spoken, but what happens is clear and unforgettable. If you haven’t seen that, see it. It is hard to watch, but you won’t for a second want to rip your eyes away from the screen during its entire three hours, three minutes. Here the time passes slowly and walking out of the theater comes as an unbridled relief.”

Kenji Fujishima, Slant Magazine:
“Montiel’s silly plot machinations waste a solid performance from LaBeouf. For once, his boyish looks serve his character well, helping the actor physically embody the idealism of a man that’s about to get fractured. If LaBeouf’s turn in ‘American Honey’ showed the kind of romantic movie-star magnetism he could summon up on a dime, in ‘Man Down’ he mostly impresses with the sheer intensity with which he physically and emotionally commits, and without vanity, to inhabiting Drummer’s increasingly cracked mental state. In a better film, this could have been a breakthrough on a par with Tom Cruise’s performance in Oliver Stone’s ‘Born on the Fourth of July,’ another chronicle of an idealistic all-American soldier who gets a bitter taste of the harsh realities of war. Sadly, Montiel fails his lead actor, trashing Drummer’s anguish by turning it into a parlor trick, thus denying him the humanity LaBeouf so valiantly tries to convey.”

Tommaso Tocci, The Film Stage:
“However, it’s not until you get through the third part – which finds Gabriel attending a mandatory psych-evaluation with Captain Peyton (Gary Oldman) in the aftermath of a traumatic incident – that you realize how bad things really are for the film. It’s a well-intentioned but bluntly allegorical piece of filmmaking, thinking too highly of its central narrative device and too poorly of its audience, which by the film’s third act is getting emotionally pummeled into the ground alongside Gabriel, and not in the right way.”

Chris Bumbray, JoBlo:
“While there are admirable things about ‘Man Down,’ including some of LaBeouf’s performance and the excellent score by Clint Mansell, it feels more like an ego-driven experiment more than a movie that’s actually meant to entertain, although I have no doubt a small audience out there will appreciate it. It’s such a small film that I hesitate to call it a major disappointment, but maybe now that they’ve got this occasionally clumsy experiment out of their systems Montiel and LaBeouf  will make something that’s for an audience rather than for themselves.”

Allan Hunter, Screen International:
“A committed, emotionally charged performance from Shia LaBoeuf is not enough to save ‘Man Down,’ a heavyhanded, hopelessly sentimental journey through the troubled mind of a traumatised American Marine. A lot of tears are spilled on screen in this heart-on-the-sleeve effort from director Dito Montiel, but it fails to provoke the requisite response in the viewer.”

Andrew Pulver, The Guardian:
“Shia LaBeouf’s reputation for attaching himself to the risky and the unorthodox would suggest that this second feature-film collaboration with writer-director Dito Montiel (after Montiel’s debut, ‘A Guide to Recognising Your Saints’) would at least be excitingly odd, whatever else. But nothing could be further from the truth: ‘Man Down ‘turns out to be – by turns – uninteresting, treacly and chock full of war-movie cliches. Added to which, it’s evidence that shorn of weird or surreal superstructure provided by more imaginative directors, LaBeouf is a very ordinary performer indeed.”

Jessica Kiang, IndieWire:
“In a couple of years when you’re watching TV and something not very good with Shia LaBeouf, Gary Oldman, Jai Courtney, Clifton Collins, and Kate Mara comes on, you’ll know that it’s Montiel’s “Man Down.”

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