An American Carol: Critic Reviews

Only you can decide whether you're in the mood to wade through the smear of stink jokes and political ravings.

Cheap shots and mean spirits abound, as do celebrity cameos. But it's the laziness of the writing that most offends.

Ultimately, the problem with An American Carol is the problem with far too much political discourse in this country, left or right: It highlights the worst excesses of the opposition for the sole purpose of discrediting the vast middle.

An American Carol is about as not-funny as a comedy can get.

Poorly made indie production has a script that feels like a list of ripostes collected over the last several years to liberal criticisms of the U.S.: The whole enterprise feels far more agenda- than entertainment-driven.

Even if it weren't three years too late to parody Moore (ineptly played by Kevin Farley), Moore's ridiculous tribute to Cuban health care in Sicko is far funnier than anything in this desperately laughless farce from David Zucker.

It's a polemic, a screed, a combination comic rant and sentimental flag-waver that doesn't work as either.

Utterly asinine, sophomoric, tasteless, the movie has much in common with Zucker's Airplane!, The Naked Gun 2 1/2 and Scary Movie sequels, minus the laughs.

Although it's refreshing to encounter a parody that doesn't use tired movie genres for inspiration, An American Carol squanders its comedic potential with a near-total absence of laughs.

Given that this supremely silly satire directed by The Naked Gun's David Zucker plays more like something slapped together to beat an expiration date, it's hard to get too worked up about it.

You could strip every last marginally political idea from the movie, and it would still probably be one of the most grueling, unfunny things released that year.

It is hard to believe that a comedy this singularly inept and downright unfunny came from one of the minds behind one of the funniest comedies of all time, Airplane!.

Kada vi%u0161e potrebe za Michaelom Mooreom ne bude, potrebe za filmovima koje tog istog Moorea parodiraju bit %u0107e jo%u0161 manje.

Using sledgehammer gags in the service of a dissent-bashing tale, Zucker aims for the flag-waving brio of Warner Bros. cartoons during World War II, but he succeeds only in ruining Farley's big break.

just too insular to be engaging

What could have been an amusing riff looks more like a propaganda film out to destroy Moore rather than spoof him.

The gags come fast and furiously with one-liners to make the case that liberals don't have exclusive rights to humor in Hollywood.

... the jokes are lame and the caricatures too removed from any defensible reality.

An American Carol dares to mock the Left, but it forgets to bring the funny.

Zucker's film reeks of a deeply insecure psychosis, one that's often insultingly mislabeled as patriotism -- which is how it gets away with wrapping itself in red, white and blue while simultaneously ridiculing our Bill Of Rights.

Nice try, but I'd watch Airplane! again first.

This movie is seriously unfunny, and it's not just my admittedly left-wing politics that are in the way of my getting the joke.

Overall, Zucker's cinematic middle finger is about as funny as an exploding toilet seat for hemorrhoid-induced senior citizens...a dreary picture mired in sophomoric sludge.

There's a good idea for a movie here: Someone considered poking fun at liberal filmmaker Michael Moore. The only problem with 'An American Carol' is that it's not funny.