Harsh Times Critic Reviews

Bale is mesmerizing and Rodriguez keeps up with him as the whole unsafe contraption zooms.Read the full review

All along, you know something terrible is going to happen, and when it does, you leave the theater shaken and deeply moved.Read the full review

Harsh Times occasionally echoes "Taxi Driver," Ayer's own "Training Day," and even "First Blood" in the way it examines the psychological disintegration of a character and the seduction of amorality.Read the full review

Ayer gets lost in a maze of ironies, and has to bulldoze his way to an exit. For a while, Harsh Times is thrillingly hard to predict. By the end, it becomes all too easy.Read the full review

A psychotic seizure of a performance by Christian Bale dominates Harsh Times, the directorial debut of David Ayer that channels "Taxi Driver."Read the full review

The film's unrelenting bleakness and misanthropic tone is likely to be a turnoff to mainstream performances, but it provides its lead actor with another opportunity to display his riveting intensity.Read the full review

Harsh Times goes down like the vinegar its protagonist chugs to try to beat a drug test. It's carefully crafted, exasperating and ugly, a festival of self-destructiveness, in all ways a reflection of its lead as brought to careening, erupting, implosive life by Christian Bale.Read the full review

Mr. Bales's spectacular technical performance of a toxic bad boy on the fast track to hell somehow lacks an inner core.Read the full review

The film amounts to a harsh and perpetual assault on viewers' sensibilities -- not only because of its violence but because of its overall bleakness.Read the full review