MR. DEEDS
"...what's most interesting about this new film is how lacking it
is in any of the things, from humor to emotion to halfway decent acting,
we might go to a movie for...It's a film that isn't there, 91 minutes
of celluloid without a movie." --Kenneth Turan, The Los Angeles Times
"This nouveau Deeds has one different wrinkle: rather than being a
laid-back sharpie who's constantly reading others, he has a pathological
compulsion to throw a punch at anybody who's being rude. Instead of
Capra-corn, this is Capra-cuffs...'Mr. Deeds' is mostly terrible,
a shambles of a comedy that looks as if it was shot by a tabloid news
crew... this is a scandalously lazy movie...Its visual clumsiness
is striking." Elvis Mitchell, The New York Times
"The movie, an idiot variation on Frank Capra's 'Mr. Deeds Goes to
Town,' might have been thrown together in even less time than it takes
Sandler to get dressed in the morning; it feels sort of like the dumbest
corporate comedy of 1987...Sandler coasts through the movie giving
new blandness to the term 'regular Joe'...This is Sandler running
on empty, repeating what he's already done way too often... --Owen
Gleiberman, Entertainment Weekly
"As proof of his innate worth, Deeds doesn't even care about money,
which is more than can be said for the people who made this movie,
who cram so many product placements into the action that you feel
like there should be an 800 number at the bottom of the screen. Not
that you'd want to order anything that's on view here." --Peter Rainer,
New York
"The irony of tabloid fodder Winona Ryder playing an unscrupulous
TV reporter in 'Mr. Deeds' competes for attention with Adam Sandler's
brave--bordering on foolhardy--attempt to follow in the famous footsteps
of Gary Cooper...overall, she has more chemistry with Sandler than
any female co-star since Drew Barrymore in 'The Wedding Singer.' Too
bad Brill's heavy-handed direction and Herlihy's draft-quality script
keep their relationship from developing beyond a cartoon." --Lou Lumenick,
The New York Post
"'Mr. Deeds' is nothing if not a cynical parody of the very Capra-cornish
virtues it purports to extol...On the other hand, it's often very
funny, in the way 'Seinfeld' was funny...But the lapses into worse-than-slapstick
mayhem (with accompanying sound effects that resemble baseball bats
on 50-gallon oil drums) is not just tiresome, but jarring, distancing
and ultimately stupid." --John Anderson, Newsday
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