I Heart Huckabees: Critic Reviews

As a madcap comedy of existence, I Heart Huckabees is literally full of itself.

David O. Russell's high-wire comedy captures liberal-left despair with astonishingly good humor: it's Fahrenheit 9/11 for the screwball set.

If it had the unwavering focus and clear-eyed vision of Russell's previous two features, I Heart Huckabees might have been brilliant.

Theirs is too painfully forced, from the movie's thin premise to its ideas about what's funny: Hoffman in a Beatles wig?

With razor-sharp performances, zingy one-liners, broad slapstick humor and a message of sorts, there's enough to distract the viewer from becoming hopelessly lost in the lint-filled chaos that is the umbilicus.

The trick of David O. Russell's splattery, overstuffed, and pretty wonderful Philosophy 101 farce is that it's also one of the sanest movies in ages.

A sort of static whirligig -- too heavy to soar but too light to ever fall flat.

The movie purports to be a comic meditation on metaphysics, but it has no intellectual resonance and resembles nothing so much as a sendup of psychotherapy.

So willfully, smugly eccentric that it grows tiresome rather quickly.

A heady, messy piece of existential angst that works against all odds.

It's a mad, mad, mad, mad, meaningful world, indeed.

Russell is hoping that the sheer volume of intellectual dither in this movie will propel audiences into the comedic stratosphere, but even astronauts know that there comes a time to touch down.

The real thing -- an authentic disaster -- but the picture is so odd that it should inspire, in at least a part of the audience, feelings of fervent loyalty.

The movie is like an infernal machine that consumes all of the energy it generates, saving the last watt of current to turn itself off. It functions perfectly within its constraints, but it leaves the viewer out of the loop.

It's filled with characters who, desperate to feel deep, want answers to life's big questions. And watching it, you, also desperate to feel deep, will want answers to big questions like, 'What's this all about?'

A head-scratcher.

The movie is disjointed and pointless. But its biggest shortcoming is that it's not funny.

Adventurous, challenging and filled with small moments of delight. Unfortunately, it's also self-indulgent, repetitious and the sort of movie you wish was great but isn't.

Simultaneously scattered and thought-provoking, as if writer/director David O. Russell gathered up all his loose ideas and decided to pack them tightly into one movie.

It is difficult for me to describe how sweet and buoyant I found the film, despite its seemingly excessive stylization.

Sinks to new depths of incoherent pretentiousness.

Clever but distancing, this existential comedy bounces along on the backs of its tasty cast, witty writing and stylistic verve.

Amid the pandemonium there's a sense of truly rigorous soul-searching.

A rewarding- frustrating smart-silly comedy of pretentious- modest ambitions.

It's like a screwball comedy written by the existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre.