The only question is: What is two-time Oscar-winning actress Hilary Swank doing in this fanciful rubbish? Her name and the promise of hordes of CGI locusts probably mean the film will scare up a crowd for its opening weekend. But whether this religious horror will sustain the release in subsequent weeks is a real question. (...) Swank looks justifiably perplexed, but there is no emotional depth to her character. Each fright sequence triggers a flashback both to the Sudan and to the little girl's recent experiences. You wonder how a character can have the memories of two people, but - whoops - here comes another plague to distract you from such thoughts.

• http://www.hollywoodreporter.com

Those two age-old foes - science and blind faith - tango yet again in this noxious slice of Biblical horror about a series of Old Testament plagues being visited upon a Louisiana bayou backwater. Hilary Swank stars as the resident nonbeliever, an ordained minister turned university professor recruited by a rural schoolteacher (David Morrissey) to convince the locals that there's a perfectly rational explanation (global warming?) for why their once crystalline lake has turned into a crimson tide pool. In short order, frogs rain from the heavens, bad CGI cattle drop dead in their tracks, and hideous boils break out on human skin, until Swank starts to wonder if maybe she was wrong to turn her back on the Lord after her husband and daughter were killed on a missionary trip to the Sudan. Cue overexposed flashbacks of ooga-booga tribesmen.

• http://www.villagevoice.com

Written by the twin brother writing team of Carey and Chad Hayes (HOUSE OF WAX), the long delayed project (its production briefly interrupted by Hurricane Katrina) has too many self-cancelling authors (Hopkins, producers Joel Silver and Robert Zemeckis) to convincingly register a dominant sensibility or strong point of view. (...) Hopkins clearly relishes the technical resources at his command. Working with some leading Hollywood animation and digital effects houses, he shows flair with some macabre and memorably menacing imagery: a high overhead shot of the dark red river, the furiously imagined locusts attacking a group, or a head that plunges into the water, witnessed from a reverse angle shot captured from underneath. But he also directs as if afflicted with a nervous disorder. Every movement, every action, is pumped up and exaggerated that if effective in producing a jolt feels increasingly mannered and manipulative.

• http://www.screendaily.com

Revisiting the book of Exodus in a feverish Southern-gothic context, this lurid, often ludicrously entertaining slab of Biblesploitation builds an earnest case for spirituality in a skeptical age. As demonstrated by the thematically similar THE EXORCISM  OF EMILY ROSE, there's an audience for this kind of faith-based sensationalism, and the chance to see righteous acts of Old Testament payback spectacularly re-enacted on the bigscreen should help Warner Bros. reap solid theatrical turnout, with an even richer ancillary harvest. (...) Working with visual effects supervisor Richard Yuricich, helmer Stephen Hopkins (...) is clearly having fun staging modern-day acts of God (or is it Satan?) on a CG-enhanced widescreen canvas. (...) Most artfully visualized is the plague of locusts, first viewed from inside a house as the windows ominously darken, the computerized critters crawling about in a state of eerie calm before the inevitable frenzied attack.

• http://www.variety.com