Choke: Critic Reviews

It's an indelibly warped cartoon of lust and despair.

An entertaining collection of vignettes strung together by a sarcastic loudmouth whose heart is breaking under his sophomoric bravado.

For all its flaws and fumbles there is a certain guilty pleasure in Choke.

Though there are moments of viable dark humor, it feels glib and lacks the sardonic quality of the novel by Chuck Palahniuk.

Choke is disappointing not for what it is but what it could have been.

Yawn.

Gregg's unstable direction mutes the humor and confuses the schmaltz, yielding a tonally discombobulated film. And a thoroughly discombobulated critic.

Gregg's adaptation of Chuck Palahniuk's novel has a fluid grasp of the impossible and possible, not to mention the profane and sacred.

It's bizarrely flat -- it has no affect. It's like Palahniuk translated into Robotese.

All the pieces are here, but you have to glue the kite together to make it fly.

Choke is too low-key for its own good, and neither Rockwell nor Macdonald seems able to find the right psychic momentum to move this thing along the way it needs to be.

A goofy blend of quirky characters, strange situations and wrong relationships, with just enough sadness running beneath its eccentricity to keep things somewhat real, Choke is a conscious oddball of a movie.

There's plenty to offend here. But there's also plenty to enjoy, Rockwell's performance topping that list.

I don't know what to tell you about a dismal bucket of nauseating swill called Choke, except to warn that if you spend hard-earned money to sit through it, you deserve to do exactly what the title implies.

Choke doesn't suffer so much from downscaled production values as from direction and packaging that just don't match Palahniuk's imaginative brio in cinematic terms.

Choke tries to be dirty but manages merely to be dingy.

[Director] Gregg makes the movie work as a sordid sex satire, but falls short in rising above that. And the many loathsome-turned-pathetic characters make Choke, in the end, a bit hard to swallow.

Sam Rockwell's resistance to boos serves him well in Choke, a black comedy that actually improves upon the Chuck Palahniuk novel that spawned it.

Maybe this stuff works on the page, in Chuck Palahniuk's darkly comic novel, but Choke is awfully tough to digest on the screen.

Self-destructive, Oedipally fixated slackers everywhere can rest safe in the knowledge that at last they have a voice in pop culture.

With Choke, director Clark Gregg has maintained writer Chuck Palahniuk's voice but the men and women populating the film come across as the half-finished constructs of a filmmaker's imagination.

Whimsical tale of a sex addict is good for some laughs but ultimately doesn't rise to the occasion.

As the story of a wallowing pig, Choke is often pretty entertaining, but when it comes to where-do-I-come-from poignancy, it can't always keep from gagging.

Choke is an admirably fearless no-net movie, but rather than wowing the crowd below, it lands in the center of the big top with a resounding thud.

Choke sucks.