All The King's Men. Tomatometer Says Don't Bother.

About three or four weeks ago, the MSM was hyping with "Oscar buzz" the remake of
All The King's Men and the spectacular performance of Sean Penn as Huey Long, the Loose-yana Kingfish who was shot dead in the Statehouse.

Today is opening day and now the reviews are starting to be filed in a staccato rat-a-tat-tat of cheap shots and heavy hitting slams against the film. Bantamweight Larry King likes it, along with featherweight Jon Meacham of Newsweek [bought his book on religion, read it, and brought it back to Barnes & Noble for a refund---just a rehash of Protestant ascendancy cliches lightly sprinkled with hat tips to the Jews and no mention of Catholics, who are numerically the most populous of American religious adherents] and someone called "Movie Mom at Yahoo."

To give the devil his due, Penn is a good actor who sometimes surpasses himself, but this sort of 13% positive rating usually is the death knell for films on opening night.

As one critic at the recent Toronto Film Festival put it, " a lot of films that are highly-touted come here and bomb, but All The K's Men is positively nuclear."