A Life Less Ordinary Critic Reviews

The movie damn near lives up to that promise. Picture the Marx brothers and the Coen boys collaborating on a valentine spiked with mirth and malice.Read the full review

From start to finish, A Life Less Ordinary feels like a group of sometimes amusing, sometimes clever, and sometimes tedious skits forced to fit together.Read the full review

Mr. Boyle's brand of heaven-sent love story comes with a strange and whimsical mean streak. Tender thoughts and ha-ha shootings don't automatically mix.Read the full review

Part kooky romance, part screwball comedy, part quirky fantasy and part Roadrunner cartoon, this is a movie that has everything except an involving storyline and characters.Read the full review

The film expends enormous energy to tell a story that is tedious and contrived.Read the full review

But the result is no more than a forced fable, a self-consciously smarty-pants concoction that is too clever by half and too pleased with itself in the bargain.Read the full review

Flippantly hip without any solid laughs, Life strains to be the flick more offbeat. [24Oct1997 pg06.D]Read the full review

Boyle isn't the first British or European filmmaker to make his obligatory zesty American road movie (apparently it's a dream for anyone raised on American cinema), but knowing that doesn't make A Life Less Ordinary any less tiring or its numerous pilferings any less obvious or annoying.Read the full review

The new film by the phenomenally talented Scots-English trio of director Danny Boyle, producer Andrew MacDonald and screenwriter John Hodge -- they did both "Shallow Grave" and "Trainspotting" -- is a failure so absolute and witless it deserves some kind of mention in the Hall of Lame.Read the full review