Joe Somebody: Critic Reviews

A surprisingly wistful, troubled film. It's not great; it's also not idiotic.

It doesn't much succeed, but Allen and the bit of acid candor the script does muster do cushion its shortcomings.

By the end of Joe Somebody, we are faced with the dismal prospect of being denied a climax, which, if it occurred, would be just as predictable as its substitute.

Not something to write home about.

Joe Somebody gives Allen a piping chance to play it sensitive, sentient and, for all the right reasons, lovable. He takes that chance and does a first-rate job.

A scruffy, amiable misfire of a comedy, full of lame jokes and mixed messages.

The movie makes smart use of the small-screen big-charm appeal of former Home Improvement star Tim Allen.

Has the look and feel of an extended sitcom episode.

Joe Somebody sends audiences home happy but also with an awareness that happy endings have to be earned in real life as on the screen.

Talented actors are wasted on bad script.

O arco dramatico vivenciado pelo personagem de Tim Allen consegue, por vezes, comover e despertar uma identificacao com o espectador. Pena que o filme, em sua insistencia em se afirmar como comedia, tente criar piadas tao vazias e mal-sucedidas.

Much of the running time is devoted to dramatic subplots and other such misguided attempts at pathos.

Bearing clear marks of a film made strictly to pay the bills, its performances are phoned in and its direction is eminently average.

An entertaining diversion and if you want a light film to just sit back and relax to, then this might just be your movie.

A cliched-filled family film with lines and situations so predictable, audiences will be left groaning rather than laughing.

The sort of feeble redemption story Hollywood often palms off on the film-going public.

It has a lot of heart and offers enough amusing situations and lines to keep most viewers happy, at least the female ones.

Pure sitcom material that could easily be polished off in 30 minutes, with laugh track.

If you're sitting through this flick searching for the two or three mild chuckles, you're in for an experience akin to that old "needle in a haystack" scenario.

...viewed as something like an expanded television sitcom, the film works pretty well, but do you really want to spend any more than thirty minutes time with it?

Neither abysmally bad nor truly good, this is filmmaking McDonald's-style: You know early on what you've let yourself in for and, while it's not too tasty, it's reasonably easy to digest.

A cloyingly mechanical wannabe comedy in the worm-turns mode.

While never truly funny or insightful, the movie works intermittently by digging a little deeper than you might expect.

A movie unsure of what it wants to be: a drama about a man wrestling his personal demons or a light-entertainment vehicle for its star, Tim Allen.

I'd rather see a whole movie about an aging B-movie actor and forget about all the stuff with Tim Allen.