Metacritic reviews

Raw, improvised and indicative of Trump’s America, The Oath reminds viewers of the need for laughter despite the downtrodden insanity around us. Thankfully, Barinholtz resists the urge to lapse into cynicism, because at the end of the day people are more important than politics.

The Oath is a film of its time, and that immediacy is both its strength and its downfall.

Despite tackling our crazy times, The Oath somehow winds up not quite crazy enough to assess them.

In The Oath, his first feature as a writer-director, comic actor Ike Barinholtz zeroes in on an approach somewhere between caustic stage comedy and "The Purge." The movie isn’t always up to the delicacy of that ambitious balancing act, but even the attempt is engaging.

The film wrongfully substitutes abrupt violence for anything truly provocative, squandering the promise of its early scenes with a disjointed third act and pat ending that renders its satire toothless.

The Thanksgiving table is a perfect battleground for these heavily entrenched political lines, with Barinholtz’s smart, nuanced script pulling no punches. While the satire definitely loses some of its bite in its wild, unpredictable closer, the film still takes Barinholtz and Haddish to fascinating places as performers – neither of them have been as intense or vulnerable onscreen to date.

A blistering political satire that may rip the bandage and the scab, as well as a lot of the skin, off a political wound that has barely had time to heal.

Here’s a project that had the nerve to address these tensions in a megaplex environment, only to squander them on a standoff it pretends could be so glibly resolved.

Clearly coming from the left but happy to make characters of all political stripes look bad, the film is often hard to take, offering laughs that are rarely cathartic enough to compensate.

Even while it asks us to recognize ourselves in a world not too distant from our own, The Oath seems to say that the worst part of a full-fledged American dystopia would be the ruined holiday dinners.