BBC
With miscast leads, banal dialogue and an absurdly overblown climax, "Killing Me Softly" belongs firmly in the so-bad-it's-good camp. Fiennes is particularly lost here, though he does get to beat a tattooed thug to a pulp and torture a goldfish. A cult hit in the making.
Time Out
Chen Kaige's western debut suggests a) that he wanted to direct the kind of sex scenes that the Film Bureau in Beijing don't allow and b) he can't tell a Mandarin duck from a turkey
Alexander Walker, Evening Standard
It all gets so wildly out of hand that when Alice in a mini-nightie is tied to the kitchen table the effect is uproarious, rather than erotic. The best to be said of such a film is that it is a collectors' piece.
Peter Bradshaw, the Guardian
Turkeys don't come plumper than this. It's a jaw-dropping catastrophe of a movie, a gruesome multiple pile-up of reputations
The Times
So bad it's hysterical. The venerable director ... claims he would never have been allowed to make such an erotic film in China. I think the word he's looking for is ridiculous. Joseph Fiennes ... meets Heather Graham at a set of traffic lights in London, and five minutes later he's kneading her naked breasts as if all the patisseries in Notting Hill depended upon it.
Empire
Unfortunately there aren't enough pages in Empire to properly describe the many hilarious moments ... Any good? Are you kidding? John Waters, Russ Meyer and Ed Wood (if he was alive) stay awake nights praying their movies are this bad. You'd be mad to miss it.
FilmFour.com
Worst film of the year? ... Likely to provoke unintentional laughter
The Independent
I felt obscurely cheated by Killing Me Softly, having read advance reports that it was unquestionably the worst movie of the year. It's bad all right, [ ... but it didn't] attain the level of epic awfulness I'd been promised: trash, but not a trash classic.
Daily Mail
An extravagantly incompetent thriller ... American screenwriter Kara Lindstrom started off in production design, to which she should return without delay.
