Metacritic reviews

Rather than trying to overwhelm viewers by overloading the senses, John Carter's effects strive to create something new using as their foundation a book that's fired imaginations for the past century.

Director Andrew Stanton's Disney extravaganza is a rather charming pastiche.

Does John Carter get the job done for the weekend action audience? Yes, I suppose it does. The massive city on legs that stomps across the landscape is well-done. The Tharks are ingenious, although I'm not sure why they need tusks. Lynn Collins makes a terrific heroine.

Stanton has built a fantastic world, but the action is unmemorable. Still, just about every sci-fi/fantasy/superhero adventure you ever loved is in here somewhere.

The film's biggest (and saddest) crime is malaise - it's not that John Carter doesn't care about what it's doing, it just can't make us care, even though the magnitude of every event, conflict and emotion is as melodramatic as its Victorian roots.

It's all too much, and it's too hard to follow. Less is more, and this movie proves it.

Stanton has been given the resources to create an expansive, expensive world, but lacks the instincts to direct live-action, a limitation that shows most in the performances. Bare of chest and fair of feature, Kitsch doesn't exhibit enough charisma to carry a project of this scale.

Nothing in John Carter really works, since everything in the movie has been done so many times before, and so much better.

Most annoying is John Carter's scarcity of action. This much buck should buy more bang.

As film theorist Siegfried Kracauer once wrote, to paraphrase, art often blooms in the most hostile soil. No such luck here.