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Choke
EMAILPRINTFox Searchlight Pictures
Mixed or average reviews
Based on 27 critic reviews
How did we calculate this?
Based on 17 votes
Read user comments
Rate this movie >
Movie Info
Genre(s): Comedy | Drama
Written by:
Chuck Palahniuk (novel)
Clark Gregg
Directed by: Clark Gregg
Release Date:
Theatrical: September 26, 2008
Running Time: 89 minutes, Color
Origin: USA
Summary
RATING: R for strong sexual content, nudity and language
Starring Sam Rockwell, Anjelica Huston, Brad William Henke, and Kelly Macdonald
Choke is a wickedly colorful dark comedy about mothers and sons, sexual compulsion, and the sordid underbelly of Colonial theme parks. Victor Mancini, a sex-addicted med-school dropout, who keeps his increasingly deranged mother, Ida, in an expensive private medical hospital by working days as a historical re-enactor at a Colonial Williamsburg theme park. At night Victor runs a scam by deliberately choking in upscale restaurants to form parasitic relationships with the wealthy patrons who “save” him. When, in a rare lucid movement, Ida reveals that she has withheld the shocking truth of his father’s identity, Victor enlists the aid of his best friend, Denny and his mother’s beautiful attending physician, Dr. Paige Marshall, to solve the mystery before the truth of his possibly divine parentage is lost forever. (Fox Searchlight)
Also On The Web: Internet Movie Database Official Studio Site
What The Critics Said
All critic scores are converted to a 100-point scale. If a critic does not indicate a score, we assign a score based on the general impression given by the text of the review. Learn more...
Entertainment Weekly Owen Gleiberman
It's an indelibly warped cartoon of lust and despair.
Read Full Review >Premiere Jenni Miller
While the movie will definitely not be to everyone's taste, black-hearted romantics will find Choke easy to swallow.
Read Full Review >The New York Times Stephen Holden
It adds up to an entertaining collection of vignettes strung together by a sarcastic loudmouth whose heart is breaking under his sophomoric bravado.
Read Full Review >Salon.com Andrew O'Hehir
A fantastical sex farce, and a highly amusing one at that, without being the least bit momentous or memorable.
Read Full Review >Portland Oregonian M. E. Russell
Rockwell is spectacular here, infusing Victor with a charm that makes you root for him despite the essentially sleazy con-man emptiness of his existence.
Read Full Review >TV Guide Ken Fox
Fine performances from Sam Rockwell and Brad William Henke deserve some passing attention.
Read Full Review >USA Today Claudia Puig
Yes, it's not for the squeamish or easily offended, but its sordidness is more superficially shocking than wickedly satirical.
Read Full Review >ReelViews James Berardinelli
The movie veers with surprising ease between comedy and tragedy. Some scenes are hilarious; others are somber.
Read Full Review >Chicago Sun-Times Roger Ebert
Some stretches are very funny, although the laughter is undermined by the desperation and sadness of the situations.
Read Full Review >Philadelphia Inquirer Steven Rea
While Choke, adapted for the screen and directed by Clark Gregg, is by no means a disaster, it is disappointing - and oddly dull.
Read Full Review >Film Threat Mark Bell
The film feels flat. I don't know how to express my criticism much more than to say that things unfold before you, but you never really engage in the world beyond just watching it.
Read Full Review >Empire Philip Wilding
An uneven take on Palahniuk’s fourth novel, Rockwell and Huston shining brightly enough to eclipse a patchy directorial debut.
Read Full Review >Seattle Post-Intelligencer Sean Axmaker
A strangely warm, affectionate look at bad behavior amid emotional damage and a stranglehold of identity issues.
Read Full Review >Los Angeles Times Robert Abele
As the story of a wallowing pig, Choke is often pretty entertaining, but when it comes to where-do-I-come-from poignancy, it can't always keep from gagging.
Read Full Review >Boston Globe Ty Burr
Disappointing not for what it is but what it could have been.
Read Full Review >The Globe and Mail (Toronto) Rick Groen
Maybe this stuff works on the page, in Chuck Palahniuk's darkly comic novel, but Choke is awfully tough to digest on the screen.
Read Full Review >The Onion (A.V. Club) Tasha Robinson
Cluttered, flavorless Choke, which crams the novel's nervy narration into an irritating voiceover, and leaps around in time and space with all the attention span of an ADD-addled child.
Read Full Review >Austin Chronicle Kimberley Jones
Mancini's character boils down to a lot of self-loathing and unresolved mommy issues – which is as tedious as it sounds.
Read Full Review >The Hollywood Reporter James Greenberg
For much of the way, the film just feels like it's pressing too hard to make an impression.
Read Full Review >Variety Dennis Harvey
Palahniuk's antic absurdism is duly present, but the hurtling pace and barely-underlying nihilism that transferred to screen so vividly in "Fight Club" aren't much in evidence here.
Read Full Review >New York Magazine David Edelstein
Sam Rockwell strips himself down to pure appetite and has a buoyant spirit. But the film sure doesn't. It's bizarrely flat--it has no affect.
Read Full Review >Village Voice Robert Wilonsky
They explain and explain again the genesis of Victor's demons, to the point where the novel and movie play almost like parodies of novels and movies in which a character has to get in touch with his feelings in order to become a better man.
Read Full Review >Slate Dana Stevens
I walked out of Choke feeling hustled, which is appropriate enough, I guess, for a movie that's a portrait of a compulsive hustler.
Read Full Review >Chicago Reader J.R. Jones
These ideas may well have cohered in Chuck Palahniuk's best-selling satirical novel, which I haven't read, but in this screen adaptation by writer-director Clark Gregg they seem more like an assortment of gimmicks.
Read Full Review >San Francisco Chronicle Ruthe Stein
An annoying little film that attempts to be lascivious but is merely ludicrous.
Read Full Review >What Our Users Said
The average user rating for this movie is 5.5 (out of 10) based on 17 User Votes
Note: User votes are NOT included in the Metascore calculation.
Space C. gave it a3:
This movie is about a sex addict whose mom is dying from dementia. Its about as funny as it sounds. In the hands of a competent cast (with the possible exception of the lead), director and scriptwriter perhaps we would have been able to at least invest in the characters. However as is we are forced to sit through 89 minutes of drama surrounding characters we don't care about and a story too poorly told and blandly presented to follow.
Jay H. gave it a3:
Preposterous and stupid, none of the characters have any depth. It's pretentious, uninteresting and poorly directed. I found very little of interest.
Bill H. gave it an8:
A really great film. Haven't read the book or seen Fight Club, so I'm making no comparisons. It is an originally funny (which, given the context/plot is impressive), and poignant journey of someone who feels damaged beyond repair - and who even has identified with that image of himself - and the twisted path he's able to forge to some kind of sanity. Really, really enjoyed all aspects of it...
Zorro gave it a9:
i enjoyed it. i was in awe. how can i put this more specifically? i went to watch this movie without having read any reviews on it, and, like yourselves, i go to watch a movie on whether the good reviews outweigh the bad. higher chance of enjoying the movie, but then again lot's of ourselves see each other outside of the census. neither here or there. SO....it was great. From who he was, to why he was, to who he'll be, and i drove off trying to get to the shiny diamond island...
John S. gave it a3:
Went in expecting satirical and edgy. Left feeling like I'd witnessed a long and painful bowel movement, from every conceivable angle.
Chad S. gave it a7:
In M. Night Shyamalan's "The Village", the period detail of the rustic homestead was perfect except for one tiny detail; the tombstones in the villagers' graveyard looked too new. Vincent's boss at a colonial theme park is constantly on the prowl for such anachorisms: a wigless pate, a newspaper, a handjob. Vincent(Sam Rockwell) is a sex addict. He doesn't have to choke the chicken(fifteen times a day!!!) like his best friend Denny(Brad William Henke). Ladies love Vincent: Ursula(Bijou Phillips) risks having her check docked by their Colloquial Old English-speaking boss, who probably knows that manual stimulation of the johnson was rare in the 19th century. Even doctors can't resist the tour guide. "Choke" also recalls "The Sixth Sense" in the way the filmmaker skillfully guards its secret from the audience through careful staging. Vincent isn't dead, but his heart is. The doctor(Kelly MacDonald) sees this. She sees crazy people. Vincent supplements his income by choking on food in public eateries. It's hard to believe that total strangers would feel responsible for Vincent's life, so much so that they'd actually send him money, but then again, Fred Flintstone felt obliged to look after a con-man(J. Montague Gypsum in an episode of "The Flintstones" called "This is Your Lifesaver") after luring him off a bridge. The near-death experience scam is for a good cause, though. Vincent wants his mother(Anjelica Huston) to have the best medical care possible. She plays a big part in her son's life, and unfortunately, the story suffers for it. If "Choke" performed the Heimlich Maneuver on itself, expelling some, if not all, of Vincent's childhood flashback scenes with Ida on the lam, it would alleviate some of the overstatement that the narrative makes about Vincent's inability to love Paige, since the son's arrested development already has an explanation through his frequent visits at the institution with his mother. Getting to know the people in Vincen't encounter group would've made better use of the film's running time. But the film is smart about reigning in the fantastical impressions that people have about Vincent at the hospital. The doctor is a hilariously fallible storyteller.
Mark gave it a0:
Have yet to see the film. For anyone who thinks Chuck is a talented writer, try this exercise: please read, or re-read the first couple of sentences to Choke, then please open the first books of Lemony Snickets "A Series of Unfortunate Events: A Bad Beginning." Not only does it appear as if Chucky lifted the idea, he did a shitty job of executing it. Snickets book is obviously geared for children and has afar superior prose style. How anyone above the age of sixteen could have opened the book "Choke" and read beyond the first two sentences is beyond me.
