Friday’s Reviews Rage: Mad Money, 27 Dresses, Cloverfield
Because this weekend’s films have received uniformly poor reviews, we’ve rounded up selections from the funniest and most brutal film criticism out there so that you don’t waste your cash at the theaters and laugh a little at Hollywood’s expense. Mad Money is absurd and Katie Holmes apparently forgot how to act; 27 Dresses is just sort of sad; and Cloverfield is a special-effects trailer blown up to 84 minutes.
Mad Money:
“Don’t take the money, just run: And the cinematic comeback of the year award goes to . . . someone other than Katie Holmes, whose comedy Mad Money is the most cringe-making return since Love Boat: The Next Wave. Holmes, with Alice Cooper hair and crazy Jim Carrey eyes, looks terrible and acts worse, unless this movie is unintentionally a lobotomy documentary. Whatever could have happened to her in the last couple of years to zap the talent out of her like this?” — The New York Post, surreptitiously referring to Tom Cruise and, perhaps, the Church of Scientology
27 Dresses:
“A forgettable, formulaic comedy so predictable that seeing it and skipping it are the exact same thing. Fox sneak-previewed the movie during the holidays, between the Christmas buzz and New Year’s hangover. Only, like everything else consumed and digested during that time period, 27 Dresses was little more than empty, leaden, stomach-aching calories all but already forgotten; and it starred … ? Oh, yes, wait—Katherine Heigl, right.” — The Village Voice
Cloverfield:
“Every few years Hollywood feels a compulsive need to blow up New York. Blasting the head off the Statue of Liberty, reducing the Brooklyn Bridge to rubble and turning Midtown into a moonscape is all done, of course, in good fun. Whether one finds Cloverfield fun, however, may depend on one’s susceptibility to cerebral hemorrhage.” — The Washington Post
