Critical Reception
Taking Chance received generally favorable reviews, and currently holds a 76/100 rating on Metacritic. Review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes gave it a more mixed reception, with 50% of professional critics giving the film a positive review.
One review from The Baltimore Sun, said that it "... is one of the most eloquent and socially conscious films the premium cable channel has ever presented," and USA Today, said "A small, almost perfectly realized gem of a movie, Taking Chance is also precisely the kind of movie that TV should be making." On the other end is Slant Magazine, saying "Instead of well-drawn characters or real human drama, we are presented with a military procedural on burial traditions. The film desperately wants the viewer to shed tears for its fallen hero without giving a single dramatic reason to do so."
The film was the most-watched HBO original in five years, with over two million viewers on the opening night, and more than 5.5 million on re-airings. Critics often attribute this success to its apolitical nature, not directly depicting nor offering an opinion of the Iraq War.
Bacon received a Golden Globe Award for Best Actor – Miniseries or Television Film and a Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by a Male Actor in a Miniseries or Television Movie. The film received ten nominations for the 61st Primetime Emmy Awards, winning the Emmy for "Outstanding Single-Camera Picture Editing for a Miniseries or Movie".
Read more about this topic: Taking Chance
Famous quotes containing the words critical and/or reception:
“An art whose medium is language will always show a high degree of critical creativeness, for speech is itself a critique of life: it names, it characterizes, it passes judgment, in that it creates.”
—Thomas Mann (1875–1955)
“To the United States the Third World often takes the form of a black woman who has been made pregnant in a moment of passion and who shows up one day in the reception room on the forty-ninth floor threatening to make a scene. The lawyers pay the woman off; sometimes uniformed guards accompany her to the elevators.”
—Lewis H. Lapham (b. 1935)