I should have been suspicious when I read the cover credits on the box:
- Wildly imaginative and clever – People
- Flat-out funny – The New York Times
- You’ll laugh till it hurts – Peter Travers, Rolling Stone
- Darkly funny, twisty-cool – Entertainment Weekly
What do they pay these people to say this stuff?
If a movie has to tell me that I am supposed to laugh because it’s funny, it’s not funny. Maybe it was missing a laugh track and I didn’t know when to laugh. But I didn’t laugh once. I was bored all the time. It was so bad, so boring, so flat-out uninteresting, that I stayed with it just so I could sit down afterwards and write about it.
Paul Giamatti plays himself and David Strathairn plays Dr. Flintstein. Giamatti is an actor who rehearses for Chekhov’s play Uncle Vanya, when he finds his soul so heavy, his entire life as well as the play begin to suffer. He finds the good Dr. Flintstein, has his soul extracted – 95% of it anyway – and stored in a test tube in a vault. Eventually it gets stolen by a Russian mule that carries souls (mules are the people who carry drugs inside their body across the border).
This film is a colossal waste of money. It fits Giamatti, it’s like a very bad Woody Allen movie, there is nothing pretty, good or funny about it.
Try to watch this and see if you can make it all the way through!
Rating: zero
This review is so damning and persuasive that you should not give it an asterisk, you should give it a single skull.
Don’t have any skulls, so I wrote “zero” per your advice.