On Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds approval rating of 11% based on 159 reviews, with an average rating of 4.30/10. The website's critics consensus reads: "With a scenery-chewing performance from Sean Penn, an absence of political insight, and an overall lack of narrative cohesiveness, these Men give Oscar bait a bad name." On Metacritic, the film has a weighted average score of 37 out of 100, based on 37 critics, indicating "generally unfavorable reviews". A. O. Scott of The New York Times expressed disappointment with the film: "Nothing in the picture works. It is both overwrought and tedious, its complicated narrative bogging down in lyrical voiceover, long flashbacks and endless expository conversations between people speaking radically incompatible accents." Michael Medved gave All the King's Men two stars (out of four) calling it "depressing and disappointing", a "stodgy melodrama" and a "pointless, pretentious, plodding period-piece". Richard Roeper also gave the remake a less than stellar review. Michael Phillips put it on his Worst of 2006 list. Some reviews were positive. Richard Schickel of Time magazine liked the movie, arguing that "it's much more faithful to the tone of the novel" than the original. Kenneth Turan (Los Angeles Times) praised the film's "undeniable moral seriousness" and the actors' "exceptional ensemble work." He argued that Zaillian's script and direction "expertly extracted the core of this greatest of American political novels, a work that is both of its time and outside it." Aftermath The film was featured in Nathan Rabin's feature for The Onion's A.V. Club, My Year of Flops. Of three categories (failure, fiasco, or secret success), he labeled All the King's Men as a failure and said of the film: "Zaillian’s dud manages the formidable feat of being at once histrionic and agonizingly dull, hysterically over-the-top yet strangely lifeless." Zaillian was stunned by the poor critical and box-office results of this film, which opened with only $3.8 million and barely made $7.2 million at the end of its run in US theaters. Another new wide release from the same weekend, the $11.5 million sequel Jackass Number Two, made $28.1 million. In an interview with the Los Angeles Times, Zaillian said that the film's poor performance was "like getting hit by a truck. ... I don't know what to make of it. ... We're all a bit shellshocked. I feel like Huey Long must have felt -- you try to do good and