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83A blithe, funny, and engaging movie.
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75The movie is more slapdash than smooth, more impulsive than calculating, and it takes cheap shots. I responded to its savage, sloppy zeal.
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75The rare case of a movie that gets better as it goes along.
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75Not as incisive a political commentary as "Thank You For Smoking," American Dreamz lampoons the public's appetite for mindless entertainment and easy distraction from serious concerns.
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75American Dreamz pitches its softballs with style. Martin Tweed, the preeningly heartless British host of the title TV show, just may be the great comic role that has always eluded Hugh Grant.
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75"Network" it's not. Weitz doesn't have the killer instinct for merciless satire but he knows how to stage a gag and deliver a punchline.
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70The jokes in American Dreamz whiz by with speed and grace, and Weitz maintains control of the material every minute.
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70Grant's second coming as a rake and an egotist is the best thing to happen to his career since "Four Weddings and a Funeral." He is twice as enjoyable as the preening bad guy as he was as the bumbling good guy, and Weitz makes perfect use of the new persona.
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67Weitz has a winning way with a one-liner, and he's recruited a stellar cast that gets the most out of his material.
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63Where good satire is drawn with a surgeon's scalpel, this comedy is done with a brush broad enough to paint - or, at least, hit - the side of a barn. But in the softer realm of parody, it has a good premise, a couple of funny performances and enough giggles for a reasonably good time at the movies.
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63This movie seems better suited as cable or video fare than for theatrical viewing.
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60Pitched too broadly to get very deeply under your skin. Still, there are some smarts at work here, and it will make you laugh.
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A film with none of the heart that has characterized Weitz's best work and none of the freshness of his most successful.
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Grant, playing a variation on Simon Cowell, resident meanie on "American Idol" and its inspiration, Britain's "Pop Idol," does what's required with seedy panache. Yet the characterization, both as written and acted, lacks a spark.
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50The only likable characters are ebullient Omer (Sam Golzari), a show-tune-loving reluctant Iraqi suicide bomber who comes to the O.C., and earnest William (Chris Klein), an American GI wounded in Iraq, who are mirror images.
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50Gets the details right while missing the big picture.
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50Hugh Grant's Martin Tweed is nowhere as menacing (or interesting) as the callous bruiser who makes every episode of American Idol a chilling psychotic adventure.
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50Putting it another way: When spoofs of bad singing and songwriting are the sharpest arrows in your quiver, and your politics are diluted until they hit about as hard as someone sticking their tongue out, your satire has a problem.
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50Weitz's idea of satire is generally both ludicrous and mild: exaggerating types, then sentimentalizing them.
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To keep his satirist's street cred, Weitz chases the sentimentality with sour slaps at the audience. But for all its supposed outrageousness, American Dreamz has a soft center.
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50As in his previous "In Good Company," Weitz wants too much to like all of his characters, and he wants us to like them too. The result is a movie devoid of any threat, or many laughs, with barn door–broad performances.
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50The vision of America as a vast, ratings-driven amateur hour is not without promise, but Weitz's movie, named for the most popular TV program in its parallel universe, is disappointingly soft in its individual characterizations.
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50As a political statement, American Dreamz is overly didactic and liberal in a read-too-many-blogs sort of way.
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50A moderately engaging satire, some of it amusing and some of it strained, but in considerable measure it reflects a strange circumstance in all our lives.
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40Maybe America will prove me wrong by voting, but I felt like you were holding back until the end.
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40Combining a gallery of targets including President Bush, "American Idol," the Iraq War and the overarching theme of a nation of citizens held in the thrall of phony dreams, pic and its ambitions are undermined by insistent cartoonishness and comic ineptitude.
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38It's a redundant comedy, like hearing the same tired joke for the 100th time.
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38A cartoonish, unfocused and mostly unfunny satire.
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38The movie tires itself out setting up the complex plot.
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38The writer-producer-director of American Dreamz makes nearly every mistake in the satirical book. His targets are either too easy or too dated. He's inconsistent in his attitudes toward them. His stereotypes are stale.
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30The jokes don't just fizzle into insignificance; they flop about with gaudy ineffectualness, gasping for air like newly landed trout.
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30The movie stands as a genuine offense against the venerable and indispensable institution of satire.
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30Weitz co-directed the wonderful "About a Boy" in 2002, but in "Dreamz" -- a tediously facile satire -- his comic instincts fail him.
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30This picture ain't funny. I winced three times, and gave a couple of short laughs, but that was it.
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30The director of "American Pie" has set out to make a merciless satire of American media culture along the lines of "Network," but his ideas are so commonplace that nothing registers except the bile.
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25Weitz doesn't have the chops for satire, let alone black comedy.
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20It is definitely the weakest movie of the Weitz catalog and will certainly be forgotten faster than Hung himself.
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User score distribution:
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Positive: 9 out of 25
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Mixed: 3 out of 25
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Negative: 13 out of 25
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ChristopherR.2
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MattS.2