Shrink: Critic Reviews

It wants to be Good Will Hunting set in the land of Entourage, but its bummed-out touchy-feeliness is every bit 
as concocted as its overly jaded showbiz corruption.

Like smog settling over Los Angeles, a creeping sense of anomie haunts the Hollywood power players and parasites sidling nervously through Shrink.

Spacey gives his best performance since Swimming With Sharks, and Palmer, the young star of Akeelah and the Bee, has matured into an actress of depth and nuance.

Shrink is no worse than the average Hollywood comedy. But it shows, more obviously than most, the bankruptcy of standard-issue American pop narrative, circa 2009.

Hollywood movies don't get much more self-regarding than this.

Jonas Pate's derivative L.A. indie brings few fresh revelations, but it does offer this insight: There is no more juice left in the strangers-connected-by-coincidence story line.

Directed by Jonas Pate and written with a nice ear for self-delusion by Thomas Moffet, Shrink mixes cliches with some pleasant surprises.

[Spacey's] good, but the film doesn't find an emotional center, and we're left with actors acting out.

I'm not his manager, but I wonder if Kevin Spacey would profit from laying off the sardonic, disaffected, emotionally numb characters for a while. They're criminally easy for him at this point in his career.

Man is born unto trouble as the sparks fly upward, and when those sparks emanate from a doobie clutched by Kevin Spacey, a smug critique of the American dream is sure to follow.

A pity-party of Hollywood narcissism.

The characters are so flatly conceived and their dilemmas so familiar that you wonder if the filmmakers even aspired to be original. Luckily, Kevin Spacey plays Carter with scene-saving grace.

Not since The Informers, based catatonically on the idiotic Bret Easton Ellis book, has the screen unleashed a Hollywood abortion as dismal and dead-on-arrival as Shrink.

Shrink starts promisingly, but Jonas Pate directs his fine cast straight into a swamp of schmaltz as every loose thread of plot gets patly resolved.

In seeking to depict the shallowness of Hollywood life, it's hard not to appear shallow yourself.

No one knows why bad things happen to good people. But we do know why bad things happen to good film ideas. They get ruined by poor scripts and indifferent direction.

There really was a much better comedy here than melodrama.

The characters in Thomas Moffett's script are intriguing enough, and director Jonas Pate gets sufficiently lively work from his eclectic cast, that you end up caring about them anyway.

Director Jonas Pate and screenwriter Thomas Moffett have turned this strongly cast, potentially smart tale of personal intersection among a mostly rarefied group of Los Angelenos into an irritating and unconvincing slog.

The film, expertly played by actors who look as if they know exactly what they are talking about, is a bit like a voyeur's view of the Hollywood we only hear about in scandal sheets.

Shrink neatly intertwines the lives of the leading characters in a manner reminiscent of Robert Altman's Short Cuts but without that film's haunting poignancy.

A limply-organised multi-story snoozefest from Jonas Pate.

Though it dwells on the seamier side of showbiz -- a seedy, pill-popping actor and a slutty casting-couch actress turn up in subplots -- it ultimately buys into the fantasy land it had started out debunking.