54: Critic Reviews

The movie is flat, logy, and amateurish -- a Scotch - tape- and - balsa - wood job.

You see garbage bags filled with cash, a lot of avid cocaine snorting and fleeting glimpses of Warhol and Truman Capote, but it all feels ho-hum.

54 is an entertaining and surprisingly serious look at the infamous New York discotheque, with a genuine nostalgia for the late '70s and early '80s, tempered by a healthy dose of jaundice - but without a sense of condescension or superiority.

Mecca of cool turns out lukewarm.

The party never gets started.

A more critical and resonant Hollywood movie about the glorious disco culture screams to be made.

The triteness comes thick and fast.

It's a flat, clumsy piece of filmmaking.

The trite story is a letdown because it traverses a predictable arc.

Decadence has rarely looked so pathetic, lethargic and dispiriting as it does in this listless film.

Neither a great night out nor a great night in.

A shapeless homage to the glory that was Studio 54 in its decadent heyday...

Let me pause for a minute to think of a more boring subject for a movie ... Sorry. I give up.

Myers shining moment. Too bad nobody saw it.

Myers exploits every vicious, self-hating line that comes his way.

Just as disappointing as Whit Stillman's Last Days of Disco, Marc Christopher's 54 suffers from a formulaic script that feels like a reworking of Saturday Night Fever and Boogie Nights, both superior and more entertaining pictures.

The writer seems helpless in finding a way to wrap up the story beyond the arrest of Rubell.

A mish-mash of bad writing, poor acting (except Myers), amateur directing and mediocre production credits.

... a wasted opportunity

The 1970s were great times, but most viewers could hardly come to that conclusion based on this film.

One can only hope "54" will hammer the final nail in disco's coffin. It's music that I don't want stayin' alive.

54 is mediocre on almost all counts: acting (with a couple of exceptions), writing, direction and cinematography are uniformly bland, inoffensive and completely unmemorable.

a nostalgic whitewash. With its sterling beat-heavy soundtrack and non-stop glitz, the movie captures the look and sound of its inspiration much more convincingly than it conjures up the Studio 54 atmosphere.

Qualifies as one of the more entertaining bad movies of the year.

I was hoping to be able to recommend 54 from a camp point of view, possibly the next Showgirls. But it's not. The fact is it's so uninvolving, it's not even interesting enough to be bad.