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70Mixing horror and comedy while minimizing the gore, writer-director Paul Weitz (About a Boy) serves up a witty adventure fantasy with a tasty dollop of schadenfreude.
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67It's more fun than a poke in the heart with a sharp stick.
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63It's creepy but tinged with sarcasm and infused with silly fun.
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63Trades breathless romance for a fun "Ripley's Believe it or Not"-flavored weirdness.
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63Reilly is very funny as the sarcastic mentor, and director Paul Weitz strikes a loopy tone in the scenes at the freak encampment.
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60While "Twilight" will make more money and get more attention, the darkly comic Cirque du Freak boasts the shaggy charm of the natural underdog.
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50The finished film has been tinkered with and tweaked so thoroughly that it borders on the incomprehensible.
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50Reilly gives it his all, and he's both very enjoyable and about as scary as a stubbed toe.
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50A profoundly unsatisfying experience - and that doesn't consider the derivative nature of the plot and a lackluster performance by the lead actor.
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50More than anything, the film lacks a rapport with its audience.
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50The film is competent without being spectacular or thrilling.
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50Cirque is a harmless bit of fluff with a very cool look, but there's just never enough bite.
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50This movie incites curiosity tinged with confusion and irritation. It bristles with interesting ideas - about friendship and freakishness, honesty and anger - and intriguing characters, all of which may blossom in later episodes.
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50Has its moments of fun, many of them having to do with Reilly's deadpan comic style. But the movie lacks the original edge of its better predecessors.
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50Actually, by way of a sequel, the filmmakers could just set Cerveris, Dafoe, and Reilly up for a purr-off. That'd be more fun than most of this film.
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40Making a vampire movie without any bite is like removing guns from a Western.
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Vampirism is the new monstrosity du jour, and with Cirque du Freak: The Vampire's Assistant, tweener boys get their own testosterone-infused variant of Twilight.
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40Disjointed and disorganized, and it meanders when it needs to gallop.
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Directed by Paul Weitz (American Pie), the movie suffers from the same tonal schizophrenia of that other recent goth wannabe, "Jennifer's Body": Is it meant to be scary or funny? Oops, it's neither.
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40The Vampire's Assistant is too busy making impossible claims about just how spectacular its sequels will be to serve up a self-contained story with a satisfying finale.
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38Jammed with story threads that don't cohere, Cirque commits the cardinal sin for a vampire movie: It's bloodless.
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38The movie has good special effects and suitably gruesome characters, but it's bloodless.
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33Subplots go nowhere, and characters -- many played by well-known actors -- barely get screen time. Willem Dafoe, Salma Hayek, and Jane Krakowski are among those who are there and gone.
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25The movie is occasionally clever, but still inferior to last year's "Twilight" film, mostly because the story is so muddled.
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12Calls to mind Grandpa taking out his dentures and trying to put on a comedy monster show for little kids at Halloween: When he tries to be scary, he's goofy, but when he tries to be goofy, he's scary.
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User score distribution:
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Positive: 17 out of 29
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Mixed: 6 out of 29
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Negative: 6 out of 29
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Uh....the point of the movie?
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SandyS5
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ElizabethN8Overall very enjoyable movie. The pacing was a LITTLE too fast, and some of the dialogue was just corny, but I liked it more than I thought I would.