David Wiegand of the "San Francisco Chronicle" called it "a very noble movie, which makes it interesting at times, but not often enough... What Jarrold has done right is to hire Andrew Davies to work with Jeremy Brock on the adaptation. There's no one better at dusting off English classics for the wide and small screens than Davies. He and Brock have done a competent job of culling just the right plot elements from Waugh's book and assembling them into a serviceable story. Whether you want to stick it out, however, is another matter entirely... Jarrold and his writers are more than respectful of the original source material, but compressing it all into two hours and change doesn't make for a terribly enjoyable film... Davies and Brock perform miracles in making this somewhat workable, but the ultimate impossibility of their task shows at the end."