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88I laughed all the way through, in fact. This is the best comedy since "The Hangover," and although it's almost a scene-by-scene remake of a 2007 British movie with the same title, it's funnier than the original.
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83Reveling in mess and homegrown multiracial mayhem, Death at a Funeral finds a new lease on life.
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75Death at a Funeral does what a good comedy is supposed to do: generate laughter. The humor gradient is lopsided - the second half, which builds comedic momentum, is significantly funnier than the first half, which is mostly set-up. Still, any such unevenness aside, the overall impression is one of enjoyability.
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70Death at a Funeral works and then some. The movie is labored, overly familiar and about 10 miles away from deep -- an elemental, sometimes excremental comedy about petty twits behaving badly. As totally unnecessary remakes go, it's one of the best.
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67Slight but agreeable picture.
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63Gets by for many of the same reasons "Date Night" got by, all of them performance-related.
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63Verdict? Mixed. Loved the slapstick, winced at the toilet humor, and mourned that the female performers were given so little to do. Funeral is funnier the second time around.
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63The new version is completely unnecessary and sloppier than it should be. It’s also still funny, partly thanks to smart casting in a few key roles and partly because farce this ironclad cannot be denied.
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63The new Funeral, directed by social commentator-director Neil LaBute ("Lakeview Terrace") doesn’t improve on the original, which wasn’t exactly a classic despite its classic structure.
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Proving that a comedy’s performers are sometimes more important than its jokes, this remake of Frank Oz’s dreary 2007 British farce of the same name livens up the proceedings by subbing in a comic African-American all-star cast.
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55The original was a little sharper, with actual satirical swipes at modern British life. The remake replaces some of that material with lazy pop-culture gags, most of them specifically African-American.
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50But nothing taps his own particular talents to unsettle audiences with truly edgy material. Funeral gets no more edgy than a potty joke and a corpse tumbling out of a coffin. This is nothing more than juvenile slapstick.
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50It's because of a superior cast that this version of "Death at a Funeral" is the rare comedy remake that's funnier than the original, however slightly. Personally, though, I'm not sure it was worth the effort.
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50The only death at this funeral was that of a good movie.
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50Still, if for the most part Death at a Funeral is as tame as the tasteful parlor where most of its action takes place, it manages to explode one taboo, in casting mostly black actors in roles originally played by whites.
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50Middling gets downgraded to muddling. Of course, on such slippery slopes, reputations are made. Damned if the original isn’t looking like a comparative gem.
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50Rock's interventions can't compensate for excessive fealty to dumb gags involving watery poop and designer hallucinogens.
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50The movie version of karaoke. It sings the same tune as the 2007 British underground hit, but it's a little, and at times a lot, off-key.
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50Think of Death at a Funeral as a comic quickie. As it presses buttons, a few laughs come out, but that’s all there is to it.
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50You won't find many surprises in the equally funny U.S. remake from producer and star Chris Rock.
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40You must really love a movie if you decide to remake it just three years after its release. But unless you also intend to improve upon the first attempt, what's the point?
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40Offers very little new for those who saw the original.
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33Rock acquits himself nicely as the responsible brother and resident straight man, but everyone else in the cast has apparently been advised to mug shamelessly and yell their lines as loudly as possible.
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30This slavishly faithful update... fails to tap into anything culturally specific or uniquely funny in its Pasadena setting or its theoretically looser, livelier black cast. And because the characters are so flat, we couldn't care less about the blows to their sense of propriety.
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25You can get away with almost anything in a farce except failing to be funny, and that's what kills Death at a Funeral.