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75The film seems simple and facile at a glance, but these characters and their dilemmas stay with you. These days, any of us could suddenly be Larry Crowne.
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75If you're looking for a movie you can take your parents or young children to without fear of embarrassment or the need for endless explanations, this is the one.
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75It's simply an opportunity to spend time with characters who may lack depth but are fun to watch.
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70This charmer about late middle-aged renaissance is pertinent for these times and a perfect summer comedy for grown-ups looking to escape robots and superheroes.
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67The pleasant surprises in Larry Crowne come from its side characters.
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63Breezy but forgettable.
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63Hanks directs with assurance. Perhaps if he had teamed with a more agile writer, less given to cheesy yuck-fests, Larry Crowne would be the nuanced adult love story it aims to be.
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63Larry Crowne should not be mistaken for a masterpiece. It is summer entertainment: genial, undemanding, lightweight.
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63Too cute for its own good, Larry Crowne is nonetheless hard to dislike.
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63A perfectly pleasant but fluffy, inconsequential romantic comedy.
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60This one coasts by on Hanks' immense appeal and charm, but more focus and a touch more sharpness are needed to make it really come alive.
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58It's enough that these two castaways are friends, but I guess friendship doesn't cut it when you're trying to create a star-driven hit. It should, though. Better a believable friendship than an unbelievable love affair.
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58As a director, Hanks makes some nice choices (Larry Crowne lives in a very naturally integrated suburb, for one) but there's little in the film that doesn't feel made-for-TV.
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58It's easy enough to accept the romantic-comedy luck of the two finding each another. It's much tougher, and ultimately useless, to buy everything else about this fairy tale of self-reinvention in a stalled economy.
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50The film is sometimes gentle to the point of blandness, but it's never flimsy.
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50Next semester, the stars should drop Speech 217 and enroll in Chemistry 101 – they dearly need some.
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50I had a migraine when I started watching Larry Crowne, and by the end, it went away. None of this quite adds up to a recommendation, but it's close. Very close.
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50It's a light and breezy, recession-themed romantic comedy; "Up in the Air" without all the angst and introspection.
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50Larry Crowne isn't a movie for adults. It's a movie for adults who don't like things with screens and keyboards.
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50I'm not quite saying that the unabashed squareness and silliness of Larry Crowne are negatives. They're almost admirable in themselves, and certainly constitute a selling point.
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50Inside this film, a poignant and personal story is struggling to get out. But it's couched in such awkward sentiments that it can't emerge.
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50The movie falls flat, playing like the best-cast bland romantic comedy you've ever seen.
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50The screenplay carries blandness to a point beyond tedium.
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50The story feels half-considered, the relationships thin, and the direction visually indifferent.
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50Every scene is on the prowl for laughs at the expense of the inherent drama in the lives of its colorful characters.
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45In the early scenes of Larry Crowne, Hanks' Larry is so assertively regular he almost comes off as a special-needs child - grinning into his coffee-cup in the big-box-store break room, he has all the sexual allure of Forrest Gump.
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40Larry Crowne is worryingly light on laughs, yet it never dares to worry too much about the plight of its central figure. [11 & 18 July 2011, p.100]
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40It put-puts along like a moped in busy traffic, content to amble around but not go anywhere.
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40A rom-com fairy tale so tepid and well behaved that watching it feels like being stuck in traffic as giddy joy-riders in the opposite lane break the speed limit. You have little choice but to cool your heels and pretend that the parched crabgrass in the median is a field of flowers.
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40Edgeless, it takes a wistful, hopeful approach to heartbreak and job loss. That's sweet, but when it comes to unemployment-themed cinema, I'll take the greater realism of last year's "The Company Men" or this year's "Everything Must Go" over Hanks's too rosy vision of life after the pink slip.
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40Though both lead actors are able to coast for a while on their natural charm, it's evident by the soppy finale that their "Sleepless in Seattle" and "Pretty Woman" salad days are long past.
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Jun 28, 201140With its eager-to-please congeniality, it almost works, but with a pacing that is at once comfortably assured and frustratingly slack, like holding exactly to the speed limit on a stretch of open road, Larry Crowne never quite comes to life.
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30This script - a collaboration between Hanks and Nia Vardalos, the writer and star of "My Big Fat Greek Wedding" - would need multiple punch-up sessions to attain mediocrity. Roberts and Hanks aren't just prevented from playing their A games; they're never even taken off the bench.
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30Larry Crowne is an inside-out movie, acceptable around the edges but hollow and shockingly unconvincing at its core. When that core is two of the biggest movie stars around - Tom Hanks and Julia Roberts - it's an especially dispiriting situation.
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30There's some cute stuff involving Hanks and some teenagers who tool around campus on scooters, but an utter lack of chemistry between him and Roberts dooms the movie.
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25Larry Crowne is more than a missed opportunity. It's alarmingly, depressingly out of touch.
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25Congenial is the word for Larry Crowne, but it's as flat as an ironing board.
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25It's the neediest movie of 2011, and one of the phoniest.
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25At least Roberts has some star wattage to burn; her megawatt smile is the only thing that ultimately pierces, however faintly, the film's blinding schmaltz.
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20A slight, facile, and ultimately yawn worthy romantic comedy, and one of the most obvious if unexpected missteps in Hanks' career.
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20Movie stars may be less valued than they used to be, but it's still puzzling to see Tom Hanks and Julia Roberts stuck in a romantic comedy as flat-footed and tone deaf as Larry Crowne.