Advanced Search Beta »
Basic Search Fields
A Life Less Ordinary
Metascore
35 out of 100

Generally unfavorable - based on 22 Critics

Critic score distribution:
  1. Positive: 3 out of 22
  2. Mixed: 11 out of 22
  3. Negative: 8 out of 22
view
per page
  1. Salon.com
    Reviewed by: Stephanie Zacharek
    80
    Gloriously excessive, passionate and messy, A Life Less Ordinary is the kind of picture that's becoming more and more of a rarity in the landscape of American movies: a love story with a hard-on.
  2. Rolling Stone
    Reviewed by: Peter Travers
    75
    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.
  3. ReelViews
    Reviewed by: James Berardinelli
    63
    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.
  4. The New York Times
    Reviewed by: Elvis Mitchell
    60
    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.
  5. Chicago Sun-Times
    Reviewed by: Roger Ebert
    50
    The film expends enormous energy to tell a story that is tedious and contrived.
  6. Christian Science Monitor
    Reviewed by: David Sterritt
    50
    Danny Boyle's dark comedy has stylishly filmed moments, but overall it's a queasy blend of amusing, pointless, and sometimes quite nasty material.
  7. New York Daily News
    Reviewed by: Dave Kehr
    50
    This aggressively "sincere" movie is without a single authentically lived moment a sense exaggerated by Brian Tufano's overcomposed cinematography, which imitates the glossy hollowness of fashion photographs. [24Oct1997 Pg 51]
    All this critic's reviews
  8. The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
    Reviewed by: Rick Groen
    50
    Here, one begins to suspect that the major impediment is the sensibility of the filmmakers themselves. They don't believe in this stuff, in its unavoidable sentimentality, and that attitude filters down to a perplexed cast.
  9. TV Guide
    Reviewed by: Maitland McDonagh
    50
    It's seldom boring and always beautifully photographed, but it's also considerably less than satisfying, perhaps because its internal logic never comes into focus.
  10. Newsweek
    Reviewed by: Andrea C. Basora
    50
    There is too much disconcerting and nasty violence in this light-hearted caper, but when it sticks to its romantic guns, it is often charming.
  11. Variety
    Reviewed by: Derek Elley
    50
    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.
  12. Chicago Reader
    Reviewed by: Lisa Alspector
    50
    All this is accompanied by a too-emphatic pop sound track that turns almost every scene into a bad music video.
  13. Los Angeles Times
    Reviewed by: Kenneth Turan
    40
    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.
  14. Time
    Reviewed by: Richard Schickel
    40
    But that's the thing about this movie. It never leaves well enough, or good enough, alone. It keeps looking--sometimes a little too hard--for ways to transform the ordinary into the discomfiting.
  15. USA Today
    Reviewed by: Susan Wloszczyna
    38
    Flippantly hip without any solid laughs, Life strains to be the flick more offbeat. [24Oct1997 pg06.D]
    All this critic's reviews
  16. Dallas Observer
    Reviewed by: Peter Rainer
    30
    What's missing is romance. Despite the engaging friskiness of its two stars, the film is romantically vapid. Watching it is like trying to warm up to a hologram.
  17. San Francisco Chronicle
    Reviewed by: Edward Guthmann
    25
    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.
  18. San Francisco Examiner
    Reviewed by: Barbara Shulgasser
    25
    The big trouble with the movie is that it's difficult to care whether these two get together. Ultimately I did care - when I realized that their union would presumably represent a chance that the movie might end soon.
  19. Austin Chronicle
    Reviewed by: Marc Savlov
    11
    A Life Less Ordinary fails on so many levels it's nearly a textbook case of What Not to Do.
  20. Washington Post
    Reviewed by: Stephen Hunter
    10
    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.
  21. Entertainment Weekly
    Reviewed by: Owen Gleiberman
    0
    The real problem is the movie itself. The plot, with its interlocking contrivances, is like a machine that keeps trapping the actors in its gears. Since they aren't allowed to relate to each other on a simple human level, the spangly back-and-forth chemistry on which a romantic comedy depends is nowhere in sight.
  22. The A.V. Club
    Reviewed by: Keith Phipps
    0
    At the very least, this film should hush those who insist that Diaz has talent beyond visual appeal, but it's unfair to single out her relatively minor offenses when there's so much else to hate about A Life Less Ordinary, an embarrassment for all concerned.
prev next
Page:
  • 1