Reception
The film has earned very positive critical reviews, with a 95% "fresh" rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Roger Ebert added Ripley's Game to his "Great Movies" list, calling it "the best of the four" Ripley films he had seen (Purple Noon, The American Friend, The Talented Mr. Ripley, Ripley's Game) and Malkovich "precisely the Tom Ripley I imagine when I read the novels," praising what he felt to be "one of most brilliant and insidious performances." Ebert criticized the decision not to release the film theatrically in North America, writing: "The failure to open it theatrically was a shameful blunder."
Peter Travers of Rolling Stone gave the film 3.5 stars out of 4, writing: "Malkovich oils himself around the plot – icy cool one moment, blazingly violent the next – with a master's finesse. Highsmith wrote five Ripley novels, and other actors have played the part, most recently and most blandly Matt Damon in The Talented Mr. Ripley. But Malkovich owns the role. He plays it for keeps." David Rooney of Variety wrote, "Malkovich's elegantly malicious performance gives Ripley's Game a magnetic center, complemented by Liliana Cavani's efficient direction and an enjoyable retro feel that recalls the British Cold War thrillers of the 1960s. Despite some pedestrian plotting and a final act that could be tighter, this is suspenseful adult entertainment that should find a receptive audience."
Other critics were less favorable, such as Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian, who gave the film two stars out of five. Some critics compared the film unfavorably to Wim Wenders' 1977 adaptation, The American Friend. Nathan Rabin of The Onion's A.V. Club remarked, "Ripley's Game fatally lacks the squirmy, desperate humanity that made Wenders' take on the same material so hauntingly tragic. Like Malkovich's suavely generic international criminal, it's all craft and no soul, with complexity and depth functioning as collateral damage for its slick thriller mechanics." Neil Young's Film Lounge, giving Ripley's Game a score of 6 out of 10, called the film a "largely uninspired" adaptation by a "pedestrian" director, calling The American Friend "brilliant" by comparison, feeling that "any viewer who is a fan of Highsmith and/or The American Friend will have major problems with this version."
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