Critical response
On Rotten Tomatoes, the film has an approval rating of 34% based on 105 reviews with an average rating of 5.10/10. The site's critical consensus reads: "Despite the best efforts of its talented leads, Won't Back Down fails to lend sufficient dramatic heft or sophistication to the hot-button issue of education reform." On Metacritic the film has a weighted average score of 42% based on reviews from 34 critics, indicating "mixed or average reviews". Audiences surveyed by CinemaScore gave the film a grade "A−" on scale of A to F.
Variety called the film a "heavy-handed inspirational drama" that "grossly oversimplifies the issue at hand." The site continued, "Barnz's disingenuous pot-stirrer plays to audiences' emotions rather than their intelligence, offering meaty roles for Maggie Gyllenhaal as a determined single mom, and Viola Davis as the good egg among a rotten batch of teachers, while reducing everyone else to cardboard characterizations. Absent high-profile champions, femme-centric pic could suffer from low attendance."
Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times rated the film 2 out of 4 stars, writing: "Both the lottery scene and the anti-union material seem to be fictionalized versions of material in the powerful documentary Waiting for Superman which covered similar material with infinitely greater depth."
Michael Medved liked the film, giving it three and a half stars (out of four) and calling it "... one of the better films of 2012."
