Dahl (Joy Ride) and the screenwriters have conjured a dreary, old-fashioned 'last roundup' of war movie and prisoner-of-war movie cliches, small but forgivable sins. Less forgivable is how Dahl squanders tension for an hour and a half cutting between the suffering prisoners and resistance intrigues in Manila and the long march of the Rangers, and a fictionalized romance story that might have made a nice little movie by itself." James Plath of Movie Metropolis wrote, "In many ways, The Great Raid adheres to the genre right down to the character types and before-battle thoughts, but it's also a curious combination of modern war tale in the manner of Saving Private Ryan and the kind of patriotic films that were made in the waning years of the war and in the fifties. It has both a realistic sheen, and an element of idealistic flag-waving. The Great Raid isn't a perfect film, but it's an engaging one, and, at times, a powerful one." Scott Weinberg of DVD Talk gave it a positive review, and described the film as "truly an 'old-fashioned' war movie...based on, and adhering very closely to, actual events that occurred in early 1945[.] The Great Raid is not a hyper-kinetic flash-banger like Pearl Harbor, nor it is a cerebral rumination like The Thin Red Line; it's just a well-hewn and efficient re-telling of true story that's worthy of remembrance." He opined that the film was delayed not because it was bad, but because its old-fashioned style is a "tough sell...in today's marketplace." Mike Clark of USA Today said, "Just about any golden age Hollywood hack could have made a zestier drama about one of the greatest rescue missions in U.S. military history," and criticized "Franco's droning voice-over" for spelling out "every sliver of historical context", and also said "a huge chunk of time is given to an uncompelling romance between a major...and a widowed nurse." Entertainment Weekly said it "lacks a center. It's an exhausted sprawl with multiple story foci, none of them terribly compelling," concluding, "Dahl does vividly re-create that least heralded burden of war: the boredom." Steven Rea of The Philadelphia Inquirer wrote, "The Great Raid, which documents the largest rescue mission in U.S. military history (and ends with archival footage of many of the real soldiers portrayed in the film), lacks the visceral sweep of Saving Private Ryan. But Spielberg's story, for all its gut-wrenching intensity,