Tolkien reviews: Biopic is 'UNIMAGINATIVE' but bolstered by Nicholas Hoult's performance

The official synopsis for Tolkien reads: “Tolkien explores the formative years of the renowned author’s life as he finds friendship, courage and inspiration among a fellow group of writers and artists at school. Their brotherhood strengthens as they grow up and weather love and loss together, including Tolkien’s tumultuous courtship of his beloved Edith Bratt, until the outbreak of the First World War which threatens to tear their fellowship apart. All of these experiences would later inspire Tolkien to write his famous Middle-earth novels.”

What do critics say about Tolkien?

The unauthorised biopic gets a disappointing 49 percent on Rotten Tomatoes, indicating negative reviews.

The critics’ consensus reads: “Tolkien has the period trappings and strong performances of a worthy biopic, but lacks the imagination required to truly do its subject justice.”

Its cast is certainly formidable, featuring Nicholas Hoult as a young Tolkien.

Holt is joined by Lily Collins, Derek Jacobi, and Colm Meaney in the film directed by Dome Karukoski and written by David Gleeson and Stephen Beresford.

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Matthew Rozsa for Salon.com:

For a film that seems to aspire to greatness, “Tolkien” is done in by its lack of vision. That was one quality which Tolkien himself was never accused of lacking.

Sheila O’Malley for RogerEbert.com:

Tolkien approaches its subject with maybe a little bit too much reverence, but shows an interest in the development of Tolkien’s ideas, his passion for philology (not the most cinematic of subjects), his love of myths and legends.

Bob Mondello for NPR :

It’s perhaps understandable that the Tolkien estate isn’t interested in being associated with this biopic – and not just because it simplifies and fudges, as biopics do.

Rex Reed for the Observer:

Maybe Tolkien had a fascinating life story full of anecdotes that inspired his future work, but it isn’t told here.

David Sims for The Atlantic:

The result doesn’t rise above the insight of a Wikipedia page.

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Rafer Guzman for Newsday:

Tolkien has plenty to recommend it, beginning with a more than credible performance from Nicholas Hoult in the title role.

Glenn Kenny for the New York Times:

The movie teems with many on-the-nose moments. And it does so while hewing so strongly to the Distinguished British Biopic ethos… that it teeters on the edge of genuine obnoxiousness.

Ty Burr for the Boston Globe:

Tolkien gives us the passing of a vanished England and the loss of a generation but not quite enough about what was won, by him for us, nor the mystery of how he won it.

Michael O’Sullivan for the Washington Post:

Tolkien is anodyne enough that no one should be terribly upset by it, let alone deeply moved in any other way.

Jesse Hassenger for the AV Club:

There are times when Tolkien the character seems more interested in his past than Tolkien the movie does.

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Justin Chang for the Los Angeles Times:

Imagination is what is most conspicuously lacking in Tolkien, which too often falls back into a pose of intellectual and aesthetic timidity.

Matthew Norman for the London Evening Standard:

It uses its imagination to build a thoughtful and charming portrait.

Todd McCarthy for the Hollywood Reporter:

Handsomely made in the customarily fastidious style of most period biographical dramas, Tolkien is strongly served by Hoult.

Andrew Barker for Variety:

The film – stately, well-acted, and ultimately insubstantial – dilutes its considerable charms with hoary literary biopic conventions, and then risks strangling them entirely with its reductively literal takes on the vagaries of artistic inspiration.

Chris Nashawaty for Entertainment Weekly:

Hoult brings a quiet, romantic intensity to the young Tolkien, Lily Collins does a lot with a little as his first love Edith, and the Hobbit horde will gobble up all of the easter-egg references peppered throughout the movie.

Tolkien is now playing in cinemas.