barbarians at the gate movie review

Log in or sign up for Rotten Tomatoes

Trouble logging in?

By continuing, you agree to the Privacy Policy and the Terms and Policies , and to receive email from the Fandango Media Brands .

By creating an account, you agree to the Privacy Policy and the Terms and Policies , and to receive email from Rotten Tomatoes and to receive email from the Fandango Media Brands .

By creating an account, you agree to the Privacy Policy and the Terms and Policies , and to receive email from Rotten Tomatoes.

Email not verified

Let's keep in touch.

Sign up for the Rotten Tomatoes newsletter to get weekly updates on:

• Upcoming Movies and TV shows
• Rotten Tomatoes Podcast
• Media News + More

By clicking "Sign Me Up," you are agreeing to receive occasional emails and communications from Fandango Media (Fandango, Vudu, and Rotten Tomatoes) and consenting to Fandango's Privacy Policy and Terms and Policies . Please allow 10 business days for your account to reflect your preferences.

OK, got it!

• About Rotten Tomatoes®
• Login/signup

Movies in theaters

• Opening This Week
• Top Box Office
• Coming Soon to Theaters
• Certified Fresh Movies

Movies at Home

• Fandango at Home
• Prime Video
• Most Popular Streaming Movies
• What to Watch New

Certified fresh picks

• 83% The Outrun Link to The Outrun
• 89% V/H/S/Beyond Link to V/H/S/Beyond
• 83% Things Will Be Different Link to Things Will Be Different

New TV Tonight

• 90% La Máquina: Season 1
• 81% Disclaimer: Season 1
• 68% The Franchise: Season 1
• 100% Sweetpea: Season 1
• -- Teacup: Season 1
• -- Abbott Elementary: Season 4
• -- Citadel: Diana: Season 1
• -- Outer Banks: Season 4
• -- Tomb Raider: The Legend of Lara Croft: Season 1
• -- Killer Cakes: Season 1

Most Popular TV on RT

• 94% The Penguin: Season 1
• 95% Nobody Wants This: Season 1
• 82% Agatha All Along: Season 1
• 84% The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power: Season 2
• 100% Heartstopper: Season 3
• 100% From: Season 3
• 92% Brilliant Minds: Season 1
• Best TV Shows
• Most Popular TV

Certified fresh pick

• 100% Heartstopper: Season 3 Link to Heartstopper: Season 3
• All-Time Lists
• Binge Guide
• Comics on TV
• Five Favorite Films
• Video Interviews
• Weekend Box Office
• Weekly Ketchup
• What to Watch

27 Best Horror Movie Remakes

Best TV Shows of 2024: Best New Series to Watch Now

What to Watch: In Theaters and On Streaming

Awards Tour

Renewed and Cancelled TV Shows 2024

Weekend Box Office: Joker: Folie à Deux Scrapes Together a Disappointing Debut

• Trending on RT
• Hispanic Heritage Month
• Spooky Season
• Re-Release Calendar
• TV Premiere Dates

Barbarians at the Gate Reviews

As a telefilm, Barbarians fascinates; as social commentary, it excels. Making an intricate business exercise both entertaining and engrossing takes lots of doing; it's handily accomplished here.

Full Review | Mar 3, 2019

Makes the greedy rich who buy and sell ordinary folks' futures seem almost lovable.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Sep 6, 2006

Rubbish with Garner whitewashing a real life villain

Full Review | Original Score: 1/5 | Oct 23, 2005

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Jul 29, 2005

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5 | Jul 7, 2005

Highly effective TV-movie with memorable Garner performance.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5 | Oct 30, 2004

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | May 6, 2004

• Cast & crew

User reviews

Barbarians at the Gate

• Sep 20, 2002
• Sep 12, 2001
• reelreviewsandrecommendations
• Sep 5, 2024
• Doctor_Bombay
• Feb 9, 1999
• Apr 6, 2011
• Masterplan00
• Mar 14, 2005
• helpless_dancer
• May 7, 1999
• ezlidblue-1
• Oct 14, 2009
• SnoopyStyle
• Mar 16, 2016
• lambiepie-2
• Sep 22, 2006
• HotToastyRag
• Jun 30, 2022
• Mar 19, 2001
• May 6, 2021
• Aug 11, 2014
• Oct 25, 2002
• merklekranz
• Aug 28, 2010
• lee_eisenberg
• Jan 14, 2010
• Jul 30, 1999
• Feb 8, 2018
• Mar 14, 1999
• Jun 29, 2010

More from this title

More to explore, recently viewed.

The Official Weblog of J.R. LeMar

Best movies you’ve never seen: barbarians at the gate.

Here’s a timely film review for two reasons. 1, James Garner died last night at age 86 and 2, Friday a jury awarded $23 billion punitive damages against RJ Reynolds Tobacco Company

This film details the story of the $25 billion Leveraged Buyout of RJR Nabisco in 1988. Filmed as a dramatic comedy it’s told primarily from the POV of RJR President F. Ross Johnson, played by Garner. We learn through flashbacks that he is a born salesman. Since he was a young man he was selling photo-shoots door to door. As he later says “a salesman is validated by every sale he makes,” and that’s Ross. He has a reputation for being a big spender, we see him hosting a large gold tournament for RJR’s vendors and investors, all in Ross’ mentality of you gotta spend money to make money . The film is also a not-so-subtle indictment of 1980’s financial excess. Leilani Sarelle plays Ross’ adoring younger wife Laurie. They fly around on a private corporate jet (one of many at RJR’s disposable) and hot black-tie parties. It’s a good life. But Johnson’s problem is that the company stock isn’t growing, due to legal concerns about tobacco use. Ross is pinning his hopes a new “smokeless” cigarette that he’s had his researchers develop. But results aren’t what he’d hoped for…

At that point he gets the idea to buy out the company and take it private, so he can run it himself. He got the idea from the notorious LBO master, Henry Kravis (Jonathan Pryce), who had approached Ross earlier about the idea. But Ross rebuffed him, afraid that if he went along with it Kravis would insist on exerting too much control over how he runs the company. So he goes at himself, with his own partners. But when Kravis finds out he makes his own LBO bid, which draws in other potentially bidders and it becomes a big bidding war, with the stakes being raised higher and higher until the final showdown.

What’s great about this film is that you don’t need to know anything about LBO’s or high finance in order to follow this story. It’s about the characters , and the kind of pressure that they face in a situation like this. Garner completely stole the show in just about every scene that he’s in. He really makes Ross seem like an underdog, and you can’t help but root for him. Pryce is also excellent as Kravis, the cold calculating billionaire. Other stand-outs are Fred Thompson and Joanna Cassidy as Jim an Linda Robinson of American Express, who are part of Ross’ investment team, Peter Riegert as their lawyer Peter Cohen, Peter Dvorsky as Henry Kravis’ partner and cousin George Roberts, and David Rasche as Ted Forstmann, a rival investor who initially tries to get Ross to side with him against Kravis, and then eventually makes his own separate bid against both of them.

It’s a fascinating film with compelling characters and an excellent cast. It’s one of my all-time favorites, I highly recommend it.

BARBARIANS AT THE GATE

Share this:

[…] events. Like when James Garner died back in July I quickly wrote reviews of two of his movies, MY FELLOW AMERICANS and BARBARIANS AT THE GATE, and posted them that day to see if I’d get hits from people […]

[…] James Garner died last July I quickly wrote reviews of two of his movies, My Fellow Americans and Barbarians At The Gate, thinking that people would be doing web searches about him when they heard about his death and […]

What do YOU think? Cancel reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed .

• Already have a WordPress.com account? Log in now.
• Subscribe Subscribed
• Copy shortlink
• Report this content
• View post in Reader
• Manage subscriptions
• Collapse this bar

Advertisement

Supported by

Review/Television; Those Good Old Takeover Days

• Share full article

By John J. O'Connor

• March 18, 1993

Going back at least as far "The Hucksters" in 1947 and coming up to "Wall Street" in 1987, American movies, those glossiest artifacts of capitalism, have taken periodic swipes at big business. Not too many, mind you, and hardly any at all in those made-for-television movies on commercial networks beholden to advertisers. So it's hardly surprising that "Barbarians at the Gate," a factual account of the takeover madness of the 1980's, has been made for sponsor-free pay cable. The flawed but fascinating production, starring James Garner, has its premiere on HBO on Saturday at 8 P.M.

Based on the exhaustive, and sometimes exhausting, best seller by Bryan Burrough and John Helyar, "Barbarians at the Gate" chronicles the multi-billion-dollar battle in 1988 for RJR Nabisco, which at the time was working feverishly on developing a "smokeless cigarette." The machinations were incredibly complex, requiring bankers galore and backfield lawyers for the lawyers on the front lines. Condensing the story into a movie running less than two hours, Larry Gelbart, the creator of television's "M*A*S*H," has eliminated the players in the middle layers to focus almost entirely on the top-level principals, most notably F. Ross Johnson, chairman of RJR Nabisco, and Henry Kravis, the master of leveraged buyouts at the Wall Street concern Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Company.

Mr. Gelbart is candid about his underlying attitude. In an HBO statement, he says: "Taking my cue from the book, we see men in $2,000 Armani suits surrounded by millions of dollars' worth of art, talking like men from 'Wiseguys,' from 'Goodfellas.' These are rough people in a certain way. They're talking about a billion this and a billion that. A lot of that money comes from cigarettes, and we know what cigarettes do to our society and societies abroad."

But the Gelbart script does try to be objective, putting the major players within the context of an era in which competition became everything and, as someone put it, money was how you kept score. Played by Mr. Garner, F. Ross Johnson is a glad-handing chief executive who has become so used to private jets and other corporate perks that control of the company becomes an obsession, no matter what the cost, even in jobs. After discussing the possibility of a leveraged buyout with Mr. Kravis, portrayed by Jonathan Pryce as a smooth eminence grise, Mr. Johnson sets out on his own with an offer to buy the company. Mr. Kravis feels betrayed. The bidding war begins. Greedy barbarians of every stripe gather around the negotiations gate.

Although they are crucial to the story, the mechanics of leveraged buyouts are not, as they say in the trade, sexy. And that's where "Barbarians at the Gate" comes up against its most formidable hurdle. Glenn Jordan, the director, works inventively to keep things in motion. People are always on the move, dark suits carrying attache cases as they move from limousines to skyscraper elevators to sumptuous board rooms, always scheming, always plotting to make another buck.

But the characters, even the main ones, remain elusive, little more than pawns in some ornate, intense game. Mr. Garner's energetic performance is perhaps a touch too winning, making Mr. Johnson such a helluva guy that it comes as something of a shock when a colleague explains that "the one thing that made Kravis's offer more attractive was that you weren't part of it." What does come across powerfully is a sense of competitiveness gone haywire. Winning becomes everything, from a tennis court to a heavyweight championship match to a corporate power dinner. Greed is not only taken for granted; it's also celebrated and rewarded.

We are having trouble retrieving the article content.

Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.

Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and  log into  your Times account, or  subscribe  for all of The Times.

Thank you for your patience while we verify access.

Already a subscriber?  Log in .

Want all of The Times?  Subscribe .