A Liar's Autobiography - The Untrue Story of Monty Python's Graham Chapman
Metascore
45 out of 100

Mixed or average reviews - based on 15 Critics

Critic score distribution:
  1. Positive: 2 out of 15
  2. Mixed: 10 out of 15
  3. Negative: 3 out of 15
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  1. New York Post
    Reviewed by: Kyle Smith
    Nov 8, 2012
    75
    Like a lesser Python entry ("The Meaning of Life"?), it's alternately brilliant and frustrating.
  2. Entertainment Weekly
    Reviewed by: Owen Gleiberman
    Nov 14, 2012
    67
    It's like watching "Yellow Submarine" laid over a celebrity-therapy episode of Dr. Phil.
  3. The Guardian
    Reviewed by: Peter Bradshaw
    Feb 9, 2013
    60
    The film's depiction of the ugliness and strangeness of his self-hating LA celeb lifestyle is disturbing. Not just for Python fans.
  4. Empire
    Reviewed by: Kim Newman
    Feb 4, 2013
    60
    A moving and often funny self-portrayal of Chapman that will delight Python fans.
  5. The New York Times
    Reviewed by: Manohla Dargis
    Nov 8, 2012
    60
    It's a colorful patchwork of family high and low points, schoolboy days, professional triumphs and assorted epiphanies (including sex with women followed by sex with men).
  6. Village Voice
    Reviewed by: Benjamin Mercer
    Nov 1, 2012
    60
    The movie has enough weird-wild-ride brio to convince you that Chapman was indeed quite a character.
  7. Boston Globe
    Reviewed by: Ty Burr
    Jan 24, 2013
    50
    The results are exactly as patchwork as that sounds, with sequences of rowdy, sacrilegious invention punctuated by long spells of tedium.
  8. The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
    Reviewed by: Liam Lacey
    Nov 16, 2012
    50
    The film only really has a pulse when it switches to live action in a few brief archival snippets, most memorably in John Cleese's appropriately outrageous eulogy for his late friend, an offering in the name of "anything for him, but mindless good taste."
  9. Portland Oregonian
    Reviewed by: Marc Mohan
    Nov 15, 2012
    50
    Unfortunately, it just doesn't come together. The animation ranges from crude approximations of Terry Gilliam's cutout style to borderline puerility, and the entire enterprise strives far too desperately for the sort of irreverence that Chapman could conjure with a cock of his pipe-clenching head.
  10. The A.V. Club
    Reviewed by: Noel Murray
    Oct 31, 2012
    42
    What's missing from this movie is any of that sense of what made Chapman so important, or why he was so often at the center of Monty Python's best skits and movies, up until his death from cancer at 48.
  11. New York Daily News
    Reviewed by: Joe Neumaier
    Nov 8, 2012
    40
    John Cleese, Michael Palin and Chapman himself (courtesy of interviews, skits and various recordings he made before his death from cancer in 1989) chime in. It's an odd little trip, but if it weren't, one would have to ask, "Well what's all this, then?"
  12. Time Out New York
    Reviewed by: Joshua Rothkopf
    Oct 31, 2012
    40
    A coda shifts to video footage of Cleese's irreverent eulogy; you wish the whole film could have been as slyly somber. It's what the colonel would have insisted upon.
  13. Los Angeles Times
    Reviewed by: Mark Olsen
    Nov 2, 2012
    30
    Feels like a failure on all fronts - unpleasant to look at, needlessly in 3D, drearily unfunny and worst of all an incomplete portrait of the person to whom it is ostensibly paying tribute.
  14. New Orleans Times-Picayune
    Reviewed by: Mike Scott
    Nov 16, 2012
    20
    But artistically interesting only takes a film so far. What it needs are laughs- - or at least a compelling narrative. It's got neither -- with the result being a film that arrives as dead as a certain parrot from a certain skit. One of the funny ones.
  15. Slant Magazine
    Reviewed by: Calum Marsh
    Oct 29, 2012
    0
    Graham Chapman's story, frankly, is better served by his Wikipedia page.

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