This movie is a business decision, and about as diverting to watch as someone reading the Universal fiscal report.

Floating this material slightly above the assembly-line level is the energetic cast and the efforts of writer-director Kris Isacsson.

There is no obvious reason for the film's meandering existence: it's a series of beautifully photographed postcards of Africa.

Oddly enough, I'm enjoying the memory of these jokes more than I actually enjoyed watching the film.

Half vulgar and funny, half tedious and cloying; despite the shameless laughs, it's still a disappointment.

This overdone project dissipates its energy in strange ways (sudden shifts to black-and-white, as though hailing the spirit of Oliver Stone and that other Costner JFK movie), and makes you wish its makers had shown the same restraint the government did during the crisis.

Nasty, regularly amusing black comedy.

A gyno-phobic fantasy about the date who won't go away.

There is something especially irritating about whimsy done badly.

A standard morality tale, and looks especially weak in the shadow of "Eyes Wide Shut" and "Fight Club," which it resembles.

A big disappointment.

Charlize Theron has charm and skill, but no actress could survive this role, which has the gravity and verisimilitude of a sketch from a late-sixties Nancy Sinatra TV special.

Computer technology may be the actual phantom menace, after all.

Little entertainment value.

The movie is a mess.

The fact that isolated bits are amusing shouldn't keep us from strongly noting that this movie really is pretty awful -- not at all worthy of guilty pleasure status.

A clumsy and tone-deaf comedy.

These are good people, yet the director has them carrying on like community theater actors playing to the balcony. It isn't fair to them, and it isn't fitting for Shakespeare.

A lot of it works for two reasons: the situation allows for plenty of business with small-town eccentrics, and Jamie Foxx has been given a loose rein in the central role.

Dumb and irritating.

One of the least endurable films of 1999.

The film looks horrendous, poorly composed and staged, and the rhythm staggers.

Spending an autumn in New York is the simple part, but the rest of the year gets more complicated. Let's see a movie about that.

So very general in its characters and story that it actively keeps you from enjoying the simple pleasures of a movie like this.

Slouches in as a weightless, instantly forgettable picture.

It probably helps to be loaded while you're watching this movie.

One wonders if the only original directors left are the obsessives and the freaks. This guy qualifies on both counts.

It does... apply Kitano's black-comic style to a different setting, and individual scenes sparkle with unexpected jokes, twists, and occasional cruelties.