With screaming headlines such as 'Amelia: Off-Course', 'First-Class Seat to Dullsville' and 'Amelia Never Gains Altitude', leading critics in America have shot down Mira Nair's Hollywood saga about the pioneering aviatrix Amelia Earhart.
'Amelia Earhart is still missing,' wrote Joe Morgenstern in The Wall Street Journal. 'In her place, Amelia presents a protofeminist with a frozen smile spouting free-as-a-bird slogans from a bird-brained script. The film struggles to stay aloft, and may soon vanish, like its namesake, without a trace. But below and beyond the mystery of Earhart's fate, Amelia leaves you wondering how its abundantly gifted director, Mira Nair, and its Oscar-winning star, Hilary Swank, could have been complicit in such clumsiness. It's the age-old question of why bad movies happen to good people.'
The Los Angeles Times asked,' Amelia: How did it make it onto the runaway?'
'History can weigh heavily on a filmmaker, and that is what happens with Amelia, a disappointing rendering of the remarkable life of Amelia Earhart,' wrote the critic Betsy Sharkey. 'The pioneering aviatrix lost in flight is a figure so iconic, and director Mira Nair so tentative with her legend, that all the reverence and tiptoeing around grounds a film that should have soared.'
Sharkey added: 'So a pioneering feminist in the hands of a feminist filmmaker should have been a perfect match. But like her subject, the filmmaker gets lost in the clouds.'
'Her (Hilary's) Amelia remains earthbound,' declared the trade publication Variety. 'The close-cropped blond hair, the '30s costumes designed by Kasia Walicka Maimone, the actress' wobbly Kansas accent -- ends up feeling like one fussy affectation on top of another.'
In Screen Daily.com, Brent Simon wrote, 'An attractively packaged but dramatically inert hagiography, the film feels so utterly designed not to offend, shock or confuse any potential age group that it ends up saying nothing of consequence about its subject.'
Among the few positive reviews was in The Hollywood Reporter, which hailed the film with the headline 'Swank Soars in Old-Fashioned Earhart Biopic.'
Philadelphia Inquirer wrote, 'Though this traditional story about a defiantly nontraditional woman doesn't always soar, it fits Hilary Swank, its producer/star, like a jumpsuit. She and Nair thrill to the life of this American who broke records, hearts, and boundaries.'
Kansas City Star, the newspaper from Earhart's home state wrote, 'Under Mira Nair's direction, Amelia is respectable and respectful, with a solid performance from two-time Oscar winner Hilary Swank.'
But it added: 'It's also bland, never going out on a narrative or stylistic limb and finally settling into an unremarkable by-the-numbers, made-for-TV approach.'
Amelia Earhart was a feminist and daredevil whose disappearance during a trans world flight in 1937 has made this iconic figure even more mysterious than in real life. The reviewers thought her life was so full of excitement that needed to be told with energy in a film. Many reviews echoed The New York Times, which called the movie 'an exasperatingly dull production.'
'The director Mira Nair, whose only qualification appears to be that she's a woman,' complained Manohla Dargis, 'who has made other films about and with women (Mississippi Masala, Vanity Fair), keeps a tidy screen -- it's all very neat and carefully scrubbed.'
Just the other day, Amelia, featuring the two-time Oscar winner Hilary Swank, was considered a contender for Oscar nominations.
While many critics said Mira Nair's film was well-intended, they also said it was too staid and lacked emotional strength or an electrifying narration. For a film like Amelia, with classy aspirations, critical support is crucial. The film has been released in 850 theatres (as opposed to Saw VI which will scaring people in over 3,400) in the hope that it will have a strong word of mouth and add more theatres in the coming weeks. But box office pundits think that Amelia is earthbound.
Box office expert Gitesh Pandya says on boxofficeguru.com that the film will open with about $5 million over the weekend. And unless the box office grows in the next two or three weeks, the movie could end up with a feeble $20 million in North America. It has to make at least $100 million in theatres and in ancillary revenues worldwide to recoup its production and advertising costs.
Many biopics such as Ray and Walk The Line have done very good business and won many awards, including the Oscars. That is why many in Hollywood, and a handful of journalists, had thought that Amelia could also fly at the nominations.
The Hollywood Review said that the film ranks with recent portrayals of Ray Charles by Jamie Foxx and Truman Capote by Philip Seymour Hoffman and could be similarly awards-bound.
