“You know you’re in trouble when you find yourself feeling sorry for one of the world’s wealthiest teenagers,” wrote Alfonso Duralde at The Wrap. “And you’re definitely in trouble when you wish the mess of a movie he stars in could be as entertainingly rotten as ‘Battlefield Earth.'”
[Oof, a “Battlefield Earth” reference … never a good sign.]
Lou Lumenick of the New York Post kept up his publication’s reputation for pun-happy headlines with “The Son Don’t Shine on Smith’s ‘After Earth,'” going on to say that the film is “Smith and his real-life son, Jaden (both affecting ridiculous mid-Atlantic accents) talking the audience to death for something like 90 minutes before the closing credits.” Lumenick also says he gave the film a rating of one star out of four simply because “Smith’s longtime enablers at Sony apparently encouraged him to whittle this humorless sci-fi epic down from a much longer movie.”