SWEPT AWAY

"Madonna's new movie is not as bad as rumor would have it. It's worse...Setting aside--just for a moment--the abhorrently misogynistic premise and the fact that Mrs. Ritchie can't act to save her life, 'Swept Away's' worst crime is that it is butt-numbingly B-O-R-I-N-G."
-- Megan Turner, The New York Post

"Mr. Ritchie has preserved Ms. Wertm?ller's basic story and studiously copied some of her shots...but he has in effect written a chapter of 'Lina Wertm?ller for Dummies'... there is no credible feeling here, no comedy, no eroticism. Madonna and Mr. Giannini never generate any physical or emotional heat. Their dialogue is leaden, their embraces mechanical. After a while I found myself wishing they would, on their island wanderings, run into Tom Hanks and his volleyball and exchange their grilled octopus recipe for some acting lessons." -- A.O. Scott, The New York Times

"'Swept Away' is a deserted island movie during which I desperately wished the characters had chosen one movie to take along if they were stranded on a deserted island, and were showing it to us instead of this one...This story was about something when Wertmuller directed it, but now it's not about anything at all. It's lost the politics and the social observation and become just another situation romance about a couple of saps stuck in an inarticulate screenplay." -- Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times

"For the first time since 'Desperately Seeking Susan,' Madonna doesn't suck as an actress. In a movie career that is by now nearly as benighted as that of Linda Blair or Maria Montez, she comes through with a performance in which her line readings don't clatter like broken plates, and she looks at least half as relaxed as she does on stage...Madonna and Giannini achieve a lively S&M chemistry." -- Owen Gleiberman, Entertainment Weekly

"It's bad enough that the director of the noisome gangster films 'Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels' and 'Snatch' likes women even less than his predecessor; unlike Wertm?ller, he proves incapable of sustaining a scene or a mood, much less a moment of quiet...In Wertm?ller's version the once-imperious woman notoriously begs the fisherman to sodomize her, a request that's meant to symbolize her submission as well as her degradation. That exchange doesn't happen here but it doesn't matter--the woman is debased from the start." -- Manohla Dargis, The Los Angeles Times