The Air I Breathe: Critic Reviews

Each story has its moments, but Air lacks an overarching vision.

I can't fault any of the actors for anything other than bad judgment. Their performances are fine, but a good fortune cookie might have told them to stay away from this.

For rock-bottom nasty, with no social relevance, there is The Air I Breathe, a load of amateurish bilge so silly I thought I was watching a screening at Comedy Central.

Morosely pretentious.

Brendan Fraser is Pleasure, Sarah Michelle Gellar is Sorrow, Kevin Bacon is Love, Forest Whitaker is Happiness, and the director is Pretension.

A stew of cheap irony, ponderous but meaningless allegory, violence and pretension, the movie is all borrowed style and calculated pandering. It does, however, get more ludicrous by the minute. So in that sense, it's good for an occasional laugh.

As the plot strands begin to coalesce everything becomes far too overwrought.

The movie takes itself way too seriously, and it doesn't add up to much, but, nevertheless, it's borderline entertaining.

Your appreciation of this circular plotting will have a great deal to do with how tongue-in-cheek you believe the film is

Mr. Lee is a former director of Asian music videos, which explains why his debut feature, from the high-octane opening credits to the Marnie-esque ending, is all style and no substance.

Aside from demonstrating how liberation and change can occur even at the most dire turn of events, it's not exactly clear exactly what his overly ambitious drama is trying to say.

A perfectly awful example of a certain breed of American indie film that brings together a lot of familiar faces for an ensemble drama about...nothing.

None of the four morality plays ... are necessarily original in plot, nor is the film itself particularly innovative in its structure ... it just seems flat and useless.

Four unappealing mini-dramas about happiness, pleasure, sorrow, and love.

With any luck, The Air I Breathe should be the last gasp of the faux-Altmanesque school of serendipitous storytelling.

not a nihilistic work of cinematic art, but a laugh-out-loud slapstick free-for-all.

Ah, January, hallowed dustbin for projects half-baked, too cooked, or both, as in the case of this overstuffed actioner.

It's particularly frustrating to watch Whittaker, the strongest thespian of the bunch, desperately mine for gold in a narrative landslide.

[Jieho] doesn't know what to do with actors, however, and the film's impressive ensemble is wasted.

Ignore all of that foolishness and watch the collision of emotions The Air I Breathe provides -- it is enough all by itself to leave you breathless.

aforitis dithenias ki ysterikis fotoskiasis spondyloto drama gia ti zoi, to sympan, kai ola ayta, opoy tesseris istories periplekontai me tin haraktiristiki, anamenomena problepsimi apithanotita toy eidoys, gia na ftiaksoyn me to zori, tin hrysi pleksoyda

A breathtakingly bad Altman rip-off that seems like a wholly unintentional parody of multi-narrative films.

Godliness, so The Air I Breathe finally tells us, is all about the Benjamins.