Metacritic reviews

About as good as a big, stupid American action movie can be without ever being anything better than a big, stupid American action movie.

This insanely busy, exceedingly long, and sometimes endearingly preposterous rendering has simply gotten the directions reversed in its insistence on sticking only to where men-who-make-adventure-flicks have gone before.

Saddled with more industry/celebrity baggage than a high-class safari voyage, Sahara is a rousing and only occasionally ridiculous adventure yarn.

Takes the action/adventure story to new heights of preposterousness. In a way, that's not a bad thing, since it allows a certain level of guilty enjoyment.

The movie, first preposterously entertaining and then just preposterous, makes James Bond films look as logical as Euclidean geometry.

It's not that Sahara is offensively bad: It's just that the picture, loud and busy as it is, never really finds its own identity.

Any movie starring Penelope Cruz or William H. Macy can't be all bad. And Sahara, which stars both Penelope Cruz and William H. Macy, proves the point: It isn't all bad.

McConaughey is usually a welcome presence, but here, he looks like making the movie was getting in the way of his exciting African adventure.

This perfectly distracting, ultimately unsatisfying film feels like a James Bond flick in which the stand-in got the lead.

A stunning piece of work--stunningly inept, stunningly incoherent, stunningly awful in every single way imaginable.