Metacritic reviews

It walks and talks like a big budget horror film, heavy on special effects and pitched at the teenage audience, and maybe that's how it will be received. But it's more impressive if you ignore the genre and just look at what's on the screen.

Spawn doesn't make a lot of sense, but the imagery whooshes by in glitzy psychedelic torrents.

Unfortunately, where the movie falls apart is in the storyline. While Spawn fans may be delighted by this effort, the uninitiated may have a hard time getting beyond the fancy special effects and often-incoherent plot.

The adventure is vulgar and violent, although the special effects are impressive.

It's all one big blur: sound, fury, and Martin Sheen devouring scenery as if it were going out of style (and in Spawn, it's definitely not).

Almost every moment has flashes and explosions and a pulsing, relentless soundtrack. It's like being trapped inside a video game.

Otherwise, the movie, which borrows from a dozen pop sources and improves on none of them, is pretty much a washout.

But after 15 minutes, this yellow-orange vision of spiraling circles of hell, snorting devils and demonic shapes continually morphing out of one another, begins to seem redundant and conceptually impoverished.

This hopelessly redundant action gross-out aspires to a form of hip vacuousness--and may achieve it.

The special effects look model-shop cheesy, as if they'd been created using a handful of action figures and MacPaint, and the rest of the picture has the flat visual finish and phoned-in performances of a TV movie.