Lisa Schwarzbaum of Entertainment Weekly deftly compares the two films. "Something has happened between Elizabeth then and now. And since the fault doesn't lie in these stars, I have to conclude that it lies in a current notion of audience tastes: that we are underlings who require a literalism that tamps down Kapur's more daring instincts for East-meets-West historical interpretation. E1 was plenty opulent, but E2 approaches the simplistic in its reliance on great gowns to catch the eye and waves — nay armada-drowning torrents — of intrusive musical score to direct a viewer's attention. E1 demonstrated the historical competition between Protestantism and Catholicism for dominance of English statehood, but E2 slips into something approaching troubling caricature — a shorthand assumption of the Catholic cause as primarily the province of scheming zealots."

For Claudia Puig of USA Today, the film "squanders the opportunity to give us a telling glimpse of the woman behind the ruff. Instead, the costume drama is all gilt and opulence. Though steeped in period haute couture, this sequel to the 1998 biopic 'Elizabeth' fails to engage us with its wan historical fiction." Though she thought, " Blanchett is as superb here as she was the first time around," Puig found, "she can't save the film, which focuses on pomp and pageantry to the detriment of substance and historical accuracy."

As Carina Chocano of The Los Angeles Times notes, "it's about 30 years later, and she's hardly aged a day. How does she do it? By sheer force of fantasy, apparently the same force that has led director Shekhar Kapur to give us Queen Elizabeth as a cross between Joan of Arc and Joan Crawford, Sir Walter Raleigh as a bodice-ripping pirate sprung from the cover of a supermarket romance novel, King Philip II of Spain as a mincing lulu with a bizarre politico-erotic fixation on the virgin ("Whore!") queen, and the battle against the Spanish Armada as a series of chopped-together outtakes from 'Pirates of the Caribbean.'"

Manohla Dargis of The New York Times says the film, "has sweep and momentum and almost as many mood shifts and genre notes as the queen has dresses. It’s intentionally playful and an inadvertent giggle, an overripe melodrama that’s by turns a bodice-ripper, a cloak-and-dagger thriller and a serious-minded historical drama with dubious contemporary overtones."

Todd McCarthy of Variety thought that, "without the pleasure of watching Cate Blanchett continue the role that launched her to stardom, there would be little to recommend this latest of many cinematic and television accounts of the celebrated monarch's life, which is melodramatic, narrowly concerned with portraying her human vulnerabilities, and, thanks to a constantly pounding musical score, bombastic."

And, as Peter Travers of Rolling Stone writes, "Cate Blanchett can do anything, even play Bob Dylan, but she can't save this creaky sequel to her star-making 1998 biopic of Elizabeth I. Fie on director Shekhar Kapur's visual and aural bombast and the script's soap-opera heart. Though the sixteenth-century queen is facing her greatest challenge, from an armada attack by King Philip of Spain (Jordi Molla's performance comes direct from the Ministry of Funny Walks), she mostly moons over Sir Walter Raleigh (Clive Owen), who'd rather unbuckle his swash for lady-in-waiting Abbie Cornish."

(Photo: Universal)