Fat Albert: Critic Reviews

The sermonizing on behalf of good clean fun and hard old effort (Cosby co-wrote the script) is as faded as Big Al's sweater after too many days on earth.

The screen version of the animated television series Fat Albert opens with a glint of promise. From there, the movie, alas, just lies down and dies.

This movie is as lame as it is tame.

A pretty cool movie.

A wildly sanitized product.

The overall approach is to throw preordained movie sequences (rap number, shopping spree) together and hope for the best.

Somewhere in its quest to be educational, Fat Albert forgot to be entertaining.

Pure of heart, devoid of toilet humor, it sticks close enough to Bill Cosby's cartoon series to pass muster.

There's much to enjoy in Fat Albert.

The movie is sweet and gentle, but not very compelling.

Although Fat Albert is smart enough to poke fun at itself director Joel Zwick can't quite conjure up any modern relevance.

At the end of this weak comedy is a strange and touching scene in which Bill Cosby and his childhood pals from Philadelphia, now elderly men, gather at the grave of Albert Robertson, the real-life inspiration for Cosby's bighearted Fat Albert.

Fat Albert is a series of tired schticks.

There are better, more artful movies in the theaters this bountiful holiday season, but few so generous-spirited and none that will leave you feeling so cheerful.

The movie ambles along at a pleasant, undemanding pace, with good-natured humor.

A clunky mix of animated hijinx, live-action farce and inspirational uplift, Fat Albert is flat-footed and ham-handed in its attempt to reconstitute a popular '70s TV cartoon show as a full-length, family-skewing feature.

A 10-minute cartoon expanded into an especially long and deadly after-school special.

Not much of a movie, but maybe it'll shame TV Land into putting the gang back on the tube.

Fat Albert manages to talk down to two generations of pop-cult consumers - the Boomers and the Gen-Xers - while leaving no reason for their uncategorized offspring to join in on the Hey! Hey! Hey! chants.

It's sad to see a comic veteran like Cosby pimping out his own franchise for a quick buck. But perhaps a rich old guy can't live on Jell-O pudding ad residuals forever.

Squandering comic opportunities at every turn, the film is content to adhere to a mantra of 'when in doubt, dance' rather than finding any clever entertaining ways to punctuate the prolonged moralizing.

The movie feels small and flat.

A sweet but small, so-so movie.