Name : Todd McCarthy / Alias : Hollywood Reporter
Rock the Kasbah morphs into a pretty implausible feel-good movie that's nearly as maudlin as it is unconvincing.

Name : Joe Neumaier / Alias : TIME Magazine
Its music-industry gags sit awkwardly next to war-zone jokes and cultural quips, landing all involved on a peace train to nowhere.

Name : Joe Morgenstern / Alias : Wall Street Journal
"Rock the Kasbah" is the mausoleum where comedy was buried.

Name : Jim Slotek / Alias : Toronto Sun
It's a movie that's half-over before it tells us what it's really about.

Name : Andrew Barker / Alias : Variety
Bill Murray heads to Afghanistan in director Barry Levinson's dreadfully misguided farce.

Name : J. R. Jones / Alias : Chicago Reader
This dismal comedy, scripted by Murray's old pal Mitch Glazer (Scrooged), evinces only enough interest in Afghanis to keep the story rolling.

Name : Brad Wheeler / Alias : Globe and Mail
Not Murray's best and not Levinson's either.

Name : Rafer Guzman / Alias : Newsday
An ongoing war is no setting for a musical comedy, especially one this glib and inane.

Name : Richard Roeper / Alias : Chicago Sun-Times
This movie is all over the place.

Name : Natalie Daher / Alias : Minneapolis Star Tribune
It fumbles a bit by prioritizing the goofy antics of its white cast over what turns out to be a smart depiction of non-Western life.

Name : David Edelstein / Alias : New York Magazine/Vulture
As one-liner after one-liner misses its mark, you begin to feel sorry for Murray, who's really too old to be playing a guy who has a little daughter . and likes to get kinky with Kate Hudson as a raucous, Dolly Parton-style hooker-businesswoman.

Name : Manohla Dargis / Alias : New York Times
Cliched, enervating, insulting - it's tough to settle on a single pejorative for "Rock the Kasbah," though abysmal might do.

Name : Michael Phillips / Alias : Chicago Tribune
A white-savior showbiz fable of a particularly dubious and retrograde variety.

Name : Michael O'Sullivan / Alias : Washington Post
Levinson never seems to know what to point his camera at, or when to cut, and Glazer never seems to know when to leave a joke alone and let the cast work.

Name : Tasha Robinson / Alias : AV Club
A comedy that's openly afraid to seem too sincere or too mawkish, and doesn't fully commit either to its comedy or its uplift. Like Murray, it's wry and presented largely in air quotes, with an accompanying eye-roll.

Name : Leah Greenblatt / Alias : Entertainment Weekly
Your enjoyment of all this will probably depend heavily on your willingness to let the words romp and Taliban coexist for approximately two hours.

Name : Lindsey Bahr / Alias : Associated Press
The movie wants to be both glib and emotionally resonant, but it can't seem to figure out what the stakes are - even as people are getting shot.

Name : Brian Truitt / Alias : USA Today
A lot of the actor's usual mercurial charm isn't used to full effect and is actually tempered when it doesn't feel like it should be.

Name : David Lewis / Alias : San Francisco Chronicle
Murray does his best to hold up the movie, but there's only so much he can do. Ultimately, his latest fish out of water never makes it back upstream.

Name : Alan Scherstuhl / Alias : Village Voice
For every moment of desert beauty, or insight into the twilight economies that flourish in a war zone, there's a key scene that appears truncated or even missing.

Name : Cary Darling / Alias : Fort Worth Star-Telegram/DFW.com
Rock the Kasbah, does not rock at all - not even a little bit.

Name : Ty Burr / Alias : Boston Globe
If it were any worse, they'd be screening it as evidence at The Hague.

Name : Stephen Whitty / Alias : Newark Star-Ledger
It needs a smarter script. It needs at least two or three perfectly engineered, joke-after-joke sequences. It needs a smart director - did you really do "Wag the Dog," Levinson? - whose idea of political satire goes beyond freshman-year sarcasm.

Name : Steven Rea / Alias : Philadelphia Inquirer
Some projects are just too misguided for the star to mug and shrug his way out of. Consider Rock the Kasbah at the top, or the bottom, of that list.

Name : Peter Travers / Alias : Rolling Stone
Rock the Kasbah goes fierce to quietly touching and back to funny again.

Name : Gary Goldstein / Alias : Los Angeles Times
An acclaimed film director, a legendary comic actor, lots of fun rock and pop songs, and a noble story at its core can't save "Rock the Kasbah" from being one hugely misguided dud.

Name : Peter Howell / Alias : Toronto Star
Quite possibly [Murray's] worst movie ever.

Name : Randy Cordova / Alias : Arizona Republic
There might be a decent movie in here somewhere, if the focus had been on the right character.

Name : Mark Jenkins / Alias : NPR
Rock the Kasbah's timing is so slack, and its screenplay so shapeless, that the movie doesn't even rise to the level of an Afghan-war Stripes. It's almost as laugh-free as the latest news from Kunduz.

Name : Soren Anderson / Alias : Seattle Times
Murray, idiosyncratic as always, dominates, but his performance can't save this misconceived mess.

Name : Alonso Duralde / Alias : TheWrap
Bill Murray is Bill Murray is Bill Murray in a comedy that's little more than a schtick delivery system with some third-act personal growth thrown in for good measure.

Name : Rafer Guzman / Alias : Newsday
A lightweight thriller posing as a heavy political drama, or vice-versa. Not thoughtful and no fun.

Name : Tony Hicks / Alias : San Jose Mercury News
It devolves into a mess of worn plot lines. If Morel wanted to give Penn's career new life as a world-weary action hero, he missed his target.

Name : Joe Williams / Alias : St. Louis Post-Dispatch
A well-executed thriller that leaves us stirred but not shaken.

Name : Joe Neumaier / Alias : New York Daily News
There's a grubby, redemptive quality that makes this tough-minded flick feel like the son of "Serpico" and "Salvador."

Name : Colin Covert / Alias : Minneapolis Star Tribune
Penn and his fellow actors are fine at conversation, but there are more dialogue-driven subplots here than a movie full of bullets and land mines requires.

Name : Bill Goodykoontz / Alias : Arizona Republic
"The Gunman" is a predictable slog through action-movie tropes, and Penn's intensity isn't a good fit.

Name : Michael Phillips / Alias : Chicago Tribune
It's a tasty cast, but the script does not do its job in crucial areas, letting the audience get way, way out ahead of the reveals.

Name : Leslie Felperin / Alias : Hollywood Reporter
Ultimately this feels like a vanity project designed to do for Penn's bankability, Africa, Spain and mercenaries what the Taken franchise did for Liam Neeson, Paris and Albanian gangsters.

Name : Peter Keough / Alias : Boston Globe
If the film's intent is to condition the audience into a distaste for violence through boredom, it succeeds.

Name : Ann Hornaday / Alias : Washington Post
"The Gunman" may start as a genre exercise of promising purpose, but it winds up being just a lot of bull.

Name : Tom Huddleston / Alias : Time Out
Too often feels like just another slice of brainless Eurotrash, packed with saw-it-coming plot twists, half-hearted car chases and an angsty hero with zero charisma.

Name : Rene Rodriguez / Alias : Miami Herald
Penn remains a furiously committed method actor, even in a paycheck role such as this one. But he's not enough to prevent the film from becoming the same-old.

Name : Kyle Smith / Alias : New York Post
Watching Penn pump iron and denounce capitalism for two hours would be roughly as illuminating as this monotonous Euro-thriller.

Name : Andrew Lapin / Alias : NPR
A dum-dum action picture that briefly pretends to be about world aid before returning to muscular, middle-aged men beating the snot out of each other.

Name : Andrew O'Hehir / Alias : Salon.com
I've pretty much always enjoyed watching Penn in everything, not despite of his hambone tendency to milk every moment of every shot but because of it. This stupid movie is no exception .

Name : Wesley Morris / Alias : Grantland
I object to The Gunman because it's unconvincing and incoherent.

Name : Rex Reed / Alias : New York Observer
Unfortunately, nobody ever won an Oscar for washboard abs. And nobody is going to win five seconds of admiration for 115 minutes of tedium in The Gunman.

Name : James Berardinelli / Alias : ReelViews
Penn is dour and not the least bit heroic in this movie. He survives the action sequences but neither they nor his participation in them gets the blood pumping.

Name : Peter Rainer / Alias : Christian Science Monitor
I doubt The Gunman will do much to advance Penn's foray into action-hero bankability, and that's probably a good thing. He's too fine an actor to be mired in nonstop shootouts while flashing his pecs and looking scowly.

Name : Alonso Duralde / Alias : TheWrap
What begins and ends as an exploration of Western exploitation of the Congo mostly follows the standard track of the retired hit-man who realizes that he hasn't quite yet eluded the sins of the past.

Name : Guy Lodge / Alias : Variety
Sadly, Penn's veiny, sweat-glazed biceps are the most objectively impressive feature of this rote, humorless thriller, a distinctly unconvincing attempt to refashion the star . as a middle-aged action hero in the Liam Neeson mold.

Name : Stephanie Zacharek / Alias : Village Voice
Penn's need to be seen as a guy of integrity is left naked in The Gunman, but at least he's having some fun with the action-movie trappings, and with taking his shirt off.

Name : Christopher Orr / Alias : The Atlantic
A dull, generic retread, made far worse by Penn's self-seriousness as an actor, by the banal political pieties he's grafted on as producer and co-writer, and by the presence of a pitifully retrograde female lead role.

Name : Steven Rea / Alias : Philadelphia Inquirer
Obviousness prevails.

Name : Liam Lacey / Alias : Globe and Mail
Like a queasy blend of Still Alice and The Bourne Identity.

Name : Ignatiy Vishnevetsky / Alias : AV Club
The Gunman is too disorganized and sloppy to make sense as political commentary or to work on the most basic level as a globe-trotting chase thriller.

Name : Betsy Sharkey / Alias : Los Angeles Times
Part of the contract that movies of this sort forge with moviegoers is that the reasons for all the running and gunning won't get in the way of the action. "The Gunman" doesn't play by those rules.

Name : Peter Howell / Alias : Toronto Star
Whatever else we might think of Sean Penn's bid for an active middle age via The Gunman, we can't doubt his enthusiasm.

Name : Soren Anderson / Alias : Seattle Times
Yes, there are plot holes aplenty, but the action is tautly staged by Morel and that makes "The Gunman" a satisfactory time-passer.

Name : A.O. Scott / Alias : New York Times
Mr. Penn, aiming for weary, battered intensity, settles into a zone somewhere between fatigue and indigestion.

Name : Chris Nashawaty / Alias : Entertainment Weekly
The kind of film that can't be bothered to do any more with its Spanish setting than have a showdown at a bullfight.

Name : Stephen Whitty / Alias : Newark Star-Ledger
The actors are good and the action is thrilling. And if the film isn't quite as seriously political as I'm guessing Penn told himself it was, it's definitely an offbeat change of pace for us.

Name : Jocelyn Noveck / Alias : Associated Press
OK, we've seen the biceps and the abs. Very nice. Now, back to the brain.

Name : Peter Travers / Alias : Rolling Stone
The Gunman degenerates into dreary setups for guns and gore. Penn merits more. So do we.

Name : Richard Roeper / Alias : Chicago Sun-Times
Rarely, though, have two Academy Award-winning actors been so stunningly off the mark in the same movie.

Name : Ben Sachs / Alias : Chicago Reader
I can imagine Sean Penn agreeing to star in this Taken knockoff on the condition that it educate moviegoers about humanitarian crises in Africa; it does, but the film feels misshapen as a result.

Name : Claudia Puig / Alias : USA Today
The only redeeming feature about The Gunman is its exotic locations.

Name : Mick LaSalle / Alias : San Francisco Chronicle
It succeeds, partly because the moral climate it presents seems so confused, but mainly because of Penn's particular aura of irascible integrity.