King's Ransom: Critic Reviews

Achieves a rare form of badness.

Basically an improv scene sprawling to feature length.

The desperately unfunny kidnapping farce King's Ransom is the cinematic equivalent of trampled chewing gum on a subway platform.

Merely a collection of antics clothespinned to a plot.

Little in this film suggests 'director' Jeff Byrd and writer Wayne Conley possess any facility -- or familiarity -- with irony or any other comedic device.

After a while, all these odious, yammering people start to sound a lot like Charlie Brown's teacher. And they somehow all end up together at a time and a place you do not want to be.

The script, by TV writer Wayne Conley, shares some elements with the old Danny DeVito comedy Ruthless People, but humor isn't one of them.

The scenarios are halfway convincing and at times even passably clever; they are never, however, especially funny.

None of this is remotely funny, despite screenwriter Wayne Conley's resorting to virtually every known stereotype about African-Americans and more crass references to menstruation and prison sex than have ever appeared in a movie rated PG-13.

Doesn't pay off.

Devoid of anything resembling wit or even guiltily amusing tasteless gags, the film lurches from one haplessly staged sequence to another, with the performers vainly struggling to infuse humor into the proceedings.

Somewhere in a pitch meeting someone must have piped up: 'I know. We'll have a guy named 'King' and he gets kidnapped, see? So there's a 'ransom'! King's Ransom, get it? After that, I've got nothing.'

This slapdash comedy barely coughs up more than a couple of funny scenes as the story moves in predictable fits and starts before sputtering out of fuel half way through.

The wordplay of the title here is the only slightly clever element of this extremely lame comedy.

Anthony Anderson shows he can star in a movie without a kangaroo in this kidnapping plan gone crazy.

King's Ransom lumbers forth clumsily, choreographing its slapstick pratfalls with all the class and taste of a Courtney Love relapse.

The thing looks like it was written in a week, directed in two, and forgotten about by all involved in less than three.

King's Ransom deserves to be bashed, burned, and have its ashes scattered over Hollywood

It is, quite plainly, like watching a movie that's trying to go out of its way to be horrible.

I couldn't pay anyone to see this movie. Literally.

(Anthony) Anderson is funny, usually. Just not here.

A mirthless comedy about venal people doing stupid things.

Byrd's romp through the most contemptible stereotypes of women, gays, and ethnic minorities makes his film unfit for just about anyone, never mind royalty.