Hall Pass: Critic Reviews

Hall Pass is hilarious, a return to form for the Farrelly Brothers.

Hall Pass, a light comedy of horny marital woe from directors Peter and Bobby Farrelly, makes a novel statement about the sex wars: It says that they're essentially over. And that the guys - in case there was any lingering suspense about it - have lost.

Once the funny and not-so-funny start to flow, you might not care, though it would be nice if the Farrellys did care about the banality of their images, just a little.

An orgy of crudity that could only appeal to adolescents too young to be admitted.

These are difficult times for fans of the Farrelly brothers, and horrendous times for fans of Owen Wilson.

Perhaps if this had been a saucy French sex comedy, it might have taken off. But in the hands of directors Peter and Bobby Farrelly, it's a clunky non-starter.

Haphazardly conceived, phlegmatically paced, lazily filmed and punctuated with gratuitous moments of sexual and scatological slapstick..

Bobby and Peter Farrelly have brought water to the arid desert currently calling itself American film comedy. It's a drink spiked with enough crudeness to cause a nasty bout of dysentery.

What once came naturally now seems like trying too hard, as the Farrellys face their own mid-life crisis.

Ever catch yourself thinking, "Man, I wish beer commercials lasted just 104 minutes longer"?

Guys can be desperately pathetic creatures when it comes to the opposite sex.

"Something about Mary" seems a lifetime ago.

Hall Pass is such a tiring and dispiriting enterprise in and of itself that using it as a potential springboard to contemplate why the Farrellys no longer 'matter' ... well, it just seems not to matter.

A gross-out comedy about the perpetual immaturity of the American male that has, amazingly enough, a mature perspective.

Another chapter in the endless saga of American male infantilism.

A problem with "Hall Pass," I think, is that both Owen Wilson and Jason Sudeikis are affable, and the movie wants us to like them.

It's secondhand, vaguely resigned material. And while Sudeikis has some talent, he's not yet ready to co-anchor a feature comedy.

The idea has been spun out to its fullest comic potential and the ultimate endorsement of monogamy is even more predictable.

I liked this movie better when it was called The Seven-Year Itch.

"Hall Pass" captures the thrill that grown men get from a dirty joke and sustains it for almost the whole picture.

The film is rarely funny, pointedly tasteless (as if that's new), usually embarrassing and always bad.

It's crude, for sure, relentlessly so, but it's also just dumb and, when it tries to get something close to serious, kind of depressing.

Not only disgusting and unendurable, but filthy and boring, too.

Those 1990s gross-out kings, Peter and Bobby Farrelly, are finally growing up, even if that maturation is visible only in highly relative terms.

An occasionally funny comedy with slow stretches that has directors Peter and Bobby Farrelly returning to their trademark gross-out humor.