Eric Packer (Pattinson) is by most measures a hollow man - arrogant, indifferent, insolent. But the man, who wants for nothing, wants for more. So Eric spends most of the movie driven to greater and greater narcissistic extremes simply to feel anything.
USA Today: Cosmopolis, based on Don DeLillo's 2003 novel about capitalist excess, could be regarded as a wake-up call for clueless one-percenters. But the film is willfully confounding, indulgent, claustrophobic and obfuscating, more concerned with attitude than clarity of focus. It's all vapid snark, didactic sermonizing and bewildering shock tactics.
LA Weekly: "Cronenberg, the great auteur of the divided self, seems to run out of fuel after that, even as the story's structure gives him further opportunity to explore his pet themes. To the extent that Cosmopolisfunctions as a super-literal conceptual exercise, it's simultaneously irritating and fascinating. But much of the film fails to function as drama, and never more so than in the interminable final scene, a two-hander in which Packer finally confronts his would-be assassin in what could be rooms of his own mind."
Huffington Post: "...Whenever he strays outside the Twilight compound, Pattinson is a dull actor who projects no interior life or even the semblance of thought.... In the company of actual actors, Pattinson is reduced to a piece of furniture, most of which displays more expressiveness than the immortal R-Patz. As one would expect from Cronenberg, there are sudden moments of shocking violence to go with the moments of unsexy sex. None of it will distract you from the fact that this limo, like the whole enterprise titled Cosmopolis, is going nowhere."
