Eagle Vs. Shark: Critic Reviews

It's a tale that reduces angst, not to mention love, to a generational tic.

One of those movies that invite you to laugh at its misfit characters and empathize with them at the same time.

You don't have to be a schoolyard bully to find yourself longing to administer swift, vicious wedgies to the nerdish inhabitants of this kitsch Kiwi excursion.

Eagle vs. Shark is the kind of movie Hollywood should make but rarely does.

You believe in it, because you believe in the small but decent lives of its characters, a rare experience for a hot weekend in June.

Floats by on a mood of concerned and puckish good will.

Maybe Judd Apatow's comedies also flatter the maturity-impaired by making their 10th-grade hang-ups lovable, but Apatow doesn't leave you thinking less of the women who abide them.

Scornful laughs are cheap laughs, and although [director] Waititi allows a few moments of gentle sweetness, he takes the easy way out too often.

Eagle vs Shark has its own distinctive style, partly thanks to whimsical little interludes of animation, but mainly because it ties blithe absurdity to a rock bed of emotional truth.

A disturbing film trying to diguise itself as a quirky romantic comedy. There are indeed some laugh-out-loud moments; unfortunately most of the laughs are aimed at -- not with -- the misfits.

The movie's idea of funny is giving the two lovers identical moles bordering their upper lips.

The tone and tenor of Waititi's effort are quieter, gentler [than Napoleon Dynamite]. This is low-key stuff, but strangely, goofily endearing.

The movie is so self-consciously odd and twee it's hard to connect with the sad-sack characters. Waititi borrowed the formula for Dynamite but created a damp firecracker.

Yes, the nerdy loser thing has been done to death, but writer-director Taika Cohen brings surprising depth to this film...Napoleon Dynamite dreams of being this movie.

Jarrod and Horsley, odd as they are as screen subjects, undeniably make an indelible impression, but result is still innocuously mild and inconsequential.

A pleasing New Zealand gloss on Napoleon Dynamite, full of geek posturing, sweet weirdness and disarmingly modest goals.

Daft, sweet, awkward and amusingly rude.

Sorely lacks is a genuine sense of humanity.

If you just can't get enough of watching a waif being mistreated for comic effect, by all means go see Eagle vs. Shark.

It sure feels like [director] Waititi got a look at Napoleon Dynamite a few dozen times on video and decided, heck, I can do that, and with cuter accents too.

It becomes increasingly difficult to care one way or another about characters who act like they have undergone frontal lobotomies.

In this sub-genre of Gen Y comedies, quirky has somehow come to mean dumb. Perhaps teens, especially guys, enjoy seeing people on screen who are not as smart as they are. It's the real revenge of the nerds.

Eagle vs. Shark might have seemed amusingly original, albeit in a self-consciously quirky, indie-movie kind of way, if Napoleon Dynamite didn't already exist.

The film's absurdist dialogue is consistently funny.