Even before it opened, Guy Ritchie, the director of Swept Away (and Madonna's husband), was bemoaning the "negative press" the film was receiving and worrying publicly about whether it would even be released. It was, but only in a handful of theaters and with only a minimum of advertising. Critics have indeed been overwhelmingly negative in their reaction to it. "Madonna's new movie is not as bad as rumor would have it. It's worse," writes Megan Turner in the New York Post. The New York Times' A.O. Scott calls the movie "soggy and superfluous." John Anderson in Newsday writes that "new ways of describing badness need to be invented to describe exactly how bad it is." Joel Siegel on this morning's Good Morning America, noted that after rooting for the male lead, played by Giancarlo Giannini's son Adriano, the audience discovers that he is actually abusive. (In the end he rapes the character played by Madonna.) "That doesn't get a passing grade from me in the 21st century," Siegel commented. Steven Rea in the Philadelphia Inquirer did find one thing to like about the movie: "lovely sun-streaked coves of crystalline blue sea ... and a nice old yacht with a funnel."