MR. DEEDS

A poor country bumpkin inherits a fortune, travels to Manhattan--where he tries to be a do-gooder but is done wrong by various city slickers, including a manipulative but pretty media gal--and finally shows the world what a wonderful, smart, ballsy guy he really is.

(Now in stores)

CAST: Adam Sandler, Winona Ryder, John Turturro, Steve Buscemi, Jared Harris, Peter Gallagher, Allen Covrt, Conchata Ferrell

DIRECTOR: Stephen Brill


"...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