Kaboom: Critic Reviews

Writer-director Gregg Araki makes an unwelcome return to the facile sexual-outlaw posing of his '90s movies.

[A] chaotic, trifling, oddly likable film.

Sort of likable, despite Araki's utter lack of interest in charming anyone who isn't already a member of his small following.

"Kaboom'' is currently having all the sex other American comedies are too shy and too commercial for.

[Araki's] assembled the best-looking cast in town and it's largely his gaga appreciation that makes the movie so much fun.

Kaboom might be borderline camp, but there's no spillover. Or perhaps it's the other way around. Perhaps Araki's vision of human sexuality is so fluid that the borders are always expanding.

The film is so disjointed and chaotic that the usual pleasures of Araki's films-which arise from the freedom that his lost boys enjoy-never take hold.

The movie has been cast, designed, clothed, scored and edited to the bleeding edge of hip, but it hasn't exactly been written.

Araki has been making movies for more than 20 years now, and his ideas haven't evolved all that much.

What's going on? Who cares?

"Kaboom" is a return to Araki's frivolous past -- fun to watch but mostly forgettable.

This isn't satire, it isn't that funny and the only bits that work are the titillating ones.

The film is Araki's most ambitious to date, with a quick pace, music that's hip and cool and a mood that alternates between playful and eccentric.

What pop spectacle!

A delirious and lighthearted pop spectacle with a dark undercurrent of apocalyptic horror, "Kaboom" is about 95 percent of the movie that writer-director Gregg Araki's fans have been waiting for.

All that's truly strange here though is that Araki gets so few jolts or laughs from this hodge-podge of genres.

Kaboom is an erotic blast of sinful flesh, fun and fantasy that you don't want to stop.

Sexy, dark, occasionally funny, good performances--but it's just too stupid to recommend.

The fact that the characters spout snappy, profane dialogue while all this is, or isn't, going on around them is more "fun" than fun; Araki's like the too-drunk guy who won't go home when the party's over.

Araki lets his absurdist imagination run wild, and "Kaboom" takes the time-honored gambit of gradually revealing that nothing is as it seems to delightfully cockamamie extremes.

... a freewheeling mystery-satire about friendship, flip-flops, campus conspiracies, paranormal activities and The Big Bang Theory.

It's an apocalyptic fable for the cool kids, and while most of the comedic elements work, the faux supernatural stuff is just dopey. That's probably the point. Never mind.

Any aging hipster harbouring feelings of nostalgia for the scrappy movies Gregg Araki made before the relative maturity of his 2004 molestation drama Mysterious Skin will be thrilled by the American director's latest salacious story of youth gone wild.

Araki deserves credit for maintaining his independent spirit. But "Kaboom" is short on impact.