"Listening to Born to Die, it turns out, is a lot like watching the movie Showgirls — right down to the cigar-chomping bad men and swimming pools that populate both — only as told from the point of view of some moonier, more passive woman in the corps behind Elizabeth Berkeley. The album should come with a drinking game, like one DVD edition of Showgirls did. It already shares a number of qualities with a drunk person. It repeats itself often, the same stock phrases popping up in song after song. It swings from lively, upbeat teasing to sad, torpid moans, and it’s usually the latter that’s tedious."