- 9
...a light and tasty morsel of a romantic comedy...
—Owen Gleiberman Entertainment Weekly
- 7
Going The Distance could stand to color outside the lines a bit more, but it's perceptive about the problems of young people torn between pursuing love or their nascent career ambitions, and the witty script, by first-timer Geoff LaTulippe, is spiked with refreshing profanity.
—Scott Tobias Onion AV Club
- 7
The calculated sexual raunch (mostly verbal) in Going the Distance impinges on its hard-edged, soft-center charm, and that may be enough to throw various audience segments straight out of the thing.
—Michael Phillips Chicago Tribune
- 7
...acknowledges both the difficulty and the comic potential of the arrangement [of the couple], and does so with enough insight and charm to make you wonder why frequent-flier love is not a more popular theme in romantic comedies.
—A. O. Scott New York Times
- 7
The calculated sexual raunch (mostly verbal) in Going the Distance impinges on its hard-edged, soft-center charm, and that may be enough to throw various audience segments straight out of the thing.
—Michael Phillips Los Angeles Times
- 6
...a not wonderful romantic comedy...
—Peter Rainer Christian Science Monitor
- 6
This is about pairing fans of Barrymore's girl-power romantic comedies with folks who dug The Hangover. Predictably, the results are a tad awkward.
—Alynda Wheat People
- 5
...should be more of a contender. But it stops short of the finish line, burying its romantic-comedy assets under calculated efforts to be socially relevant and vulgar attempts at humor.
—Claudia Puig USA Today
- 4
...fervently follows its genre's trademark formula, its lack of imagination so pronounced that it's a miracle Cake's "The Distance" doesn't appear on the soundtrack.
—Nick Schager Slant Magazine
- 4
...a not-very-good romantic comedy...
—Karina Longworth Village Voice
- 4
...this uneven effort saddles its likable leads, Drew Barrymore and Justin Long, with the kind of verbally exaggerated sexual humor that not only comes off as embarrassingly strained and calculated, but also compromises what the picture genuinely wants to be -- a sweet, sincere look at the often-competing priorities of work and romance.
—Justin Chang Variety
- 4
...a not-very-good romantic comedy...
—Karina Longworth LA Weekly
- 4
Barrymore and Long are both appealing, but not enough to sustain audience interest in the cinematic equivalent of dry-humping.
—Peter Travers Rolling Stone
- 3
...I was compelled -- numerous times -- to flee the theater and escape this awkward, uncomfortable, and frequently irritating film.
—Sean O'Connell filmcritic.com
- 3
...not even remotely funny.
—Lou Lumenick New York Post
- 0
Going the Distance is, in a way, a remarkable film: It's hard to imagine any romantic comedy going wrong in so many different ways. There almost seems to be a contest going on for worst scene, worst character, most cringe-inducing moment and most awesomely bad line.
—Kirk Honeycutt Hollywood Reporter