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"2 stars"
by Lew Irwin
full review:
The famed aviatrix Amelia Earhart may have been regarded as a fascinating figure and overdue for a movie about her, but most critics have not found this movie very fascinating at all. As Lou Lumenick comments in the New York Post: "Considering this is the first-ever theatrical biopic of Earhart, she deserves better." Claudia Puig in USA Today says that the problem is, "We don't get a sense of what propelled her to such courageous heights. Familiar platitudes, headline montages and voice-over pontificating bog down the story in superficiality." It's worse than that, says Joe Morgenstern in the Wall Street Journal. As played by Hillary Swank, he writes, "we get 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." And Michael O'Sullivan in the Washington Post adds: "Look, nobody's asking for a miniseries here, but at times the movie feels more like a History Channel documentary -- respectful to the point of reverential -- than a rip-snorting yarn."
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