Most critics come down in favour, and none against. The praise clusters on ambition: Gaghan takes several apparently unconnected stories and knits them into a single picture of the global oil trade, and the reviews admire the richness of its detail and the plainness of its settings. The ensemble is widely liked, with George Clooney’s quiet turn as Bob Barnes singled out more than once, and a few critics note that the film gathers real momentum once the strands begin to converge.
Almost every review, warm or cool, calls the film confusing. The favourable ones treat that as the design: a thriller meant to be as hard to follow as the business it describes. The cooler ones, Slant Magazine and The Guardian among them, find it overstuffed and hard to care about, and settle on a mixed verdict. The spread is narrow; the disagreement is only over whether the difficulty is earned.