Finding Amanda: Critic Reviews

Set mostly in Las Vegas, Finding Amanda offers a vision of confused Americans losing their already shaky bearings in the world's gaudiest honky-tonk.

The film's tone shifts jarringly from superficial broad comedy to something far darker. And the hooker-with-a-heart-of-gold scenario is as old as the profession itself.

Finding Amanda has its wispy charms, including a funny scene when the ecstasy Taylor pops begins to kick in, and later when he encounters a pimp with showbiz aspirations.

Tolan writes regularly for smart shows like Rescue Me, but his best instincts deserted him when he set his sights on the big screen for the first time.

A peculiar film, which is really two films fighting to occupy the same space.

Finding Amanda, the alternate title of which might well have been "I Oughta Be in Rehab," is an uneasy chronicle of addiction and denial wrapped in the rhythms of Neil Simon.

Offers a steady supply of clever lines but suffers from the patina of self-loathing common to industry lifers and the unfortunate miscasting of straight-arrow Broderick as a depressed, cynical hack.

It can be done -- there are rich, sordid black comedies out there -- but Tolan doesn't quite pull it off.

Matthew Broderick regains his cinematic stride as a morosely wise-cracking television producer on the skids, ably abetted by Maura Tierney as his much-put-upon wife and Brittany Snow as his perky prostitute niece.

Much of Finding Amanda doesn't stand up to close scrutiny, but at its best the still-boyish Broderick suggests his most famous character, Ferris Bueller, going through a midlife crisis.

Written with more bite, the premise might hold up, but as executed here by Tolan, it is a soft-hearted, haphazard mess.

Mature, uneven prostitution dramedy loses its way.

Offers up some zinger lines in the trenches of Sin City but fails to live up to its ingenious concept.

A very darkly humorous film.

Hopelessly uneven yet admittedly entertaining...

This unromantic comedy is something less than a sure bet. For some reason, you get the impression that it doesn't live up to the promise of its premise.

This vulgar film, replete with vile language and graphic descriptions of sex acts, degrades our culture. Even George Carlin might find it offensive.

Broderick's sunny spin on the deeply flawed Taylor is interesting but eventually defies belief. In the third act, Finding Amanda loses steam altogether.

Though Finding Amanda's story reaches a reasonably satisfying conclusion, the empty characters at its center make the whole thing feel like a waste.

Amanda can never find a tone. It opens with a scene-reading (Taylor is a writer on a hacky TV show) that produces yawns, where our lead character is the only one that laughs. It's prophetic.

The familiar premise here has sharp fangs, unsparing wit and a knockout performance by Brittany Snow as the round-heeled 20-year-old.

Writer-director Peter Tolan has glibness down pat, but can't quite wring the intended pathos from his characters' desperate lives. He does, however, give Broderick his best part since Election.