Gentlemen Broncos: Critic Reviews

The audience may have bought the act in Napoleon Dynamite. But this time, the act bombs.

Timing, good jokes and characters you can laugh with and at are mostly missing

Runs out of ideas after 20 minutes.

If you didn't know otherwise, you'd swear that Gentlemen Broncos was made by a disaffected high school student -- and not a particularly talented one.

What Michael Bay did for the Hollywood blockbuster with his second Transformers movie, Jared Hess has now done for the low-budget indie with Gentlemen Broncos -- namely, stain an entire genre with a sense of soulless calculation.

Hess deserves credit, I suppose, for so effectively channeling his inner seven-year-old. Personally, I preferred spending two hours in the company of Spike Jonze's.

Hess wrote and directed "Dynamite," and here's proof we shouldn't have rewarded him. The hollow Broncos is even more cruelly disdainful, designed primarily to scorn the pathetic lives within.

If you're past the age of worrying about detention, it's an endurance test. How many grotesques, morons and creeps can you watch twist in a barely moving narrative wind?

The best part is Jemaine Clement as Benjamin's grandiose genre hero, Dr. Ronald Chevalier. Even if you love him on Flight of the Conchords, you'll be unprepared for his genius -- and charisma.

Jared Hess, who made Napoleon Dynamite, a film I admit I didn't get, has made a film I don't even begin to get.

Satire aside, what the oddball folks here never feel is real, despite the filmmakers' claims of autobiographical parallels.

Where do you go after rocket-propelled deer statuary, cyclops warriors in golf carts, and Mike White with a dubbed Irish accent?

A tedious and unfocused concoction involving science fiction, plagiarism and the nightgown industry.

Don't pay money to see it, don't waste your time if it comes on cable; you might not even want to bother reading the rest of this review.

At one level, it is pretty bad. Then, on the other level, it is downright horrible. Unless you're an entertainment masochist, neither is very much fun.

With no message beyond the superficial absurdity of it all, Hess is in a precarious position to be critiquing the intellect or artistry of anyone else.

It tests your patience even at 90 minutes.

The sci-fi themed Gentlemen Broncos doesn't just visit Planet Quirk, it crash lands upon it.

There's a lesson behind Gentlemen Broncos, the new film from director Jared Hess: Don't try to mock above your talent level.

The relentlessly (and overbearingly) quirky imagination of filmmaker Jared Hess yields diminishing returns in his third feature.

The movie's a chaotic, infuriating mess that will challenge the most-devoted of the Napoleon Dynamite faithful.

Rockwell is the film's only consistently amusing presence.

Classic underdog vs smug establishment stuff, you might think. But it's all played out in puke-slathered anti-comedy sketches better suited to no-budget YouTube videos than a multimillion-dollar film.

The presence of Flight of the Conchords star Jemaine Clement is the main point of interest in this so-so comedy...

This deliberately amateurish, self-indulgent effort manages to be odd while rarely remembering to be funny.