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75A small and not particularly ambitious movie, but it's pleasing and exceptionally well made. It was directed by Stephen Frears, and while it's not up there with his best - "Dangerous Liaisons," "The Queen," "High Fidelity," "Cheri" - Lay the Favorite lavishes the same attention on the personal, on relationships, and, like most Frears films, it puts a woman at the center of the story.
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63Frears has a lot of fun with the bad tempers and high spirits of this crew of adrenaline junkies, and though the story falls a little flat, the script is sprinkled with dry wit.
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63On autopilot from beginning to end, Lay the Favorite feels like sitcom blown up to big-screen proportions. The laughs aren't raucous or numerous, the character development is sketchy at best, and the insider's perspective on bookies and gambling is superficial.
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Dec 2, 201260A classy cast and Frears' light touch can't help this innocent abroad dramedy into the winner's enclosure. More jeopardy, less laboured larking, and it could've romped home.
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58At best, Lay The Favorite registers as cartoon sociology, but the film's featherweight charms dissipate whenever it moves away from the world of gambling and devotes time to go-nowhere subplots involving Hall's bland romance with Jackson, or Willis' troubled but fundamentally healthy marriage to Zeta-Jones.
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40Adapted from a comic thriller by Carl Hiaasen, South Florida's day-glo answer to Elmore Leonard, the film missed the fizzy, beach-friendly fun of Hiaasen's work, and wound up playing the comedy and the suspense at half-speed. It couldn't keep up with its own protagonist.
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40Romance and capers exist in Lay the Favorite, they just aren't played well.
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40Lay the Favorite is frenzied without being funny. Like Judy Holliday on a particularly manic day, Hall tears from scene to scene with a bubbly effervescence that is technically impressive yet increasingly exhausting.
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40The comedy just isn't that funny and the enterprise never finds an exact tone.
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40Particularly disappointing given the names involved, it's only mildly amusing at best, and more often downright tedious.
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40Stephen Frears is a supremely accomplished director, but perhaps there was little he could do with this garbled and unsatisfying story about gambling.
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40Rebecca Hall's enjoyably bubbly lead performance lends the picture an occasional frisson of amusement.
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30The movie is a bust, and, as usual in these situations, it is easier to say how than why, and best to say as little as possible, cut one's losses and move on.
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30Screeches and scrambles from scene to scene with manic sitcom energy, much like the cherished pet hamster of one of its characters.
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Dec 6, 201225By the end of the film it seems that even Frears has given up. Lay The Favorite places a bet but comes up empty with a comedy that won't make you smirk, with a gaggle of characters and actors who bounce and riff with very little rhyme or reason.
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25Hollywood celebrities romping around in a candy-colored Alexa-shot criminal underworld, pretty much as a means of passing time.
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20One of those factors must have settled upon the unlucky shoulders of Stephen Frears, who certainly has the pedigree to go all the way. And yet, he stumbles so badly with Lay the Favorite, his comic adaptation of Beth Raymer's memoir, that one is left wondering what could possibly have gone wrong.