The reviews are in for Matt Damon’s Promised Land and, well, they aren’t great.

Most critics tend to say the same things – good casting, interesting premise, but the devil is in the details. In this case, the detail is that the film is “too gimmicky for its evident earnestness”, according to LA Times reviewer Kenneth Turan. The New York Times’s A.O. Scott calls the film’s treatment of the topic “both honorable and disappointing” while The Washington Post’s Ann Hornaday calls the film “a well-intentioned dry well”, with regard to Damon and Krasinski’s performances. Overall, the reviews are luke-warm at best, but that doesn’t necessarily seal Promised Land’s fate at the box office. As we’ve seen more than once in the past, critics and movie-goers tend to disagree sometimes.

Something that certainly does not bid well for Promised Land, however, is its current score on review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes. With an overall ”rotten” score of just 48% and liked by just 40% of viewers, the environmental drama (if that's even a genre) is far from a smash hit. What a disappointing start for such a promising film! Of course, this is far from being the final nail in the coffin, but it does means that the flick probably won’t be competing with the likes of Django Unchained or The Hobbit for box office attention.