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75The movie works fairly well as a pitch-dark comedy, and very well as a dead-on satire of upward mobility and its discontents.
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75Quirky and enjoyable.
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60It may not feature the funniest performances Stiller, Walken and Black have ever given but, these three guys giving performances just this funny is enough to make Envy a movie you'll end up kicking yourself for missing.
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50The laughs tend to come in fits and starts, built around individual set pieces rather than being generated organically out of the storytelling.
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50Black somehow feels reigned in; shaved and barbered, he's lost his anarchic passion and is merely playing a comic role instead of transforming it into a personal mission.
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50Envy is such an ugly emotion, perhaps it deserves an ugly movie. Barry Levinson's Envy fills the bill - a mean-spirited black comedy saturated with dog-poo jokes and only intermittent yowls of mirth.
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50Envy is in the unenviable position of saddling two of Hollywood's most talented comic actors with a script that doesn't do them justice.
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50[Walken's] every minute on screen is filled with that level of jittery invention, and, watching him at play, not even the flintiest temper could resist a wide grin. Envy can surely be a trial, but Saint Christopher is there to ease our troubled journey and see us smilingly home.
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50One of those cinematic curiosities that almost always fade quickly, but that will usually find a devoted cult audience once it hits that peculiar Elysian Field known as the aftermarket.
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40Levinson, who has directed enough films to know better, should recognize a stinker of a script when he smells one: Instead clever laughs he serves up sloppy schtick, dead spots filled with lame ad-libbing and Walken crooning "The Happy Wanderer."
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40Even the relatively successful pairing of neckless maestro of anxiety Stiller with the indomitably effervescent Black gets bogged down by Steve Adams' aimless screenplay. Would the Barry Levinson who once made "Diner" please wake up and pull himself together?
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40Ultimately more amusing than hilarious, and sometimes less than that.
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A woeful little comedy that runs out of steam shortly after its opening sequence.
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40Can't decide whether to be an eccentric black comedy or a middle-of-the-road diversion.
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38Envy is a shaggy dog-poop story that'll make you wish you could spray something at the screen to make it disappear.
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38There are a few chuckles here and there, and there are odd wisps of cleverness in the script by Steve Adams, but for the most part, Envy is a film that doesn't know where it's going.
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38Envy makes a pretty entertaining three-minute trailer. If only they'd left it at that.
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30The most telling symptom of bad comedy is pretty easy to diagnose: no laughs.
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30Squandered in foolish horseplay and on a story that zigzags so far out of control that it feels as if the screenwriter, Steve Adams, pasted together a bunch of zany notions in a frantic search for confusion.
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With all the dog dung in Envy, it's almost too easy to generalize that it stinks. But it does, unfortunately, despite the big-name actors in its cast.
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30With so many dubious elements at play, even the half-good ideas get lost in the shuffle.
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25Environmentalists are up in arms. "Where did the shit go?" they want to know. The answer is painfully obvious: into the screenplay.
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25The film is neither fish nor fowl nor some arresting new entity, but a lumpish coagulation of conflicting impulses and unrealized gestures.
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25It's remarkably appropriate that Envy is about turds, because that's what the movie is.
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25Leaves you with the dismaying sensation that Levinson, who should probably be off making his own version of ''The Player,'' has instead crafted a comedy of self-loathing, burying himself in a movie that deserves to be Vapoorized.
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20You'd think it'd be hilarious. Think again.
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20Envy feels like a comedy in search of a drama in search of some sort of lugubrious existential meaning; it never quite seems to know where it's going to head next, and neither will the audience.
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16Stiller and Black have the chemistry of fingernails-on-blackboard and the movie is disastrously unfunny.
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12A weirdly airless disaster, a turkey so insistently DOA that the dialogue serves as its own epitaph.
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10In short, every element suggests Envy ought to be amusing, but the only comparably disastrous movie in recent memory involves Ben Affleck, Jennifer Lopez, and a rapping retarded man.
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User score distribution:
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Positive: 9 out of 17
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Mixed: 2 out of 17
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Negative: 6 out of 17
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MatthewR.8The people that rate these movies have nothing better to do! This movie is way better than all those idiotic "gangsta movies."
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Bilbo9