MOVIE REVIEWS: HOMEFRONT

The most positive review of Homefront, starring Jason Statham and James Franco and written by Sylvester Stallone may be Manohla Dargis’s in the New York Times, who calls the movie “an indefensibly enjoyable piece of exploitation hackwork.” Actually, Mick LaSalle in the San Francisco Chronicle says about the same thing in different words: “Homefront is hard not to like and impossible to respect.” Most other critics are not so forgiving. “It’s melodrama without momentum, and trash that doesn’t burn,” comments Liam Lacey in the Toronto Globe and Mail. Across town, Linda Barnard in the Toronto Star calls it a “violent yawner.” Rafer Guzmán in Newsday faults Stallone’s “completely confused script.” And Scott Bowles in USA Today delivers the coup de grace: “Homefront,” he writes, “is what Breaking Bad may have resembled had Sylvester Stallone written the TV show.”