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50There's a great film hiding somewhere in the wreckage of "Love Ranch."
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25Material this banal needs a madman of David Lynch proportions to incinerate it. Hackford leaves it intact, forcing us to regard a car he doesn't have the guts or skill to crash.
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60Love Ranch proves to be a provocative, highly entertaining and surprisingly touching peek into a unique world movies don't often explore.
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30Director Taylor Hackford ("Ray") seems to be aiming for a big "Boogie Nights" social canvas, though the movie's risible prize-fight sequence is more reminiscent of the later "Rocky" sequels.
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50The script fails to persuade me this story needed to be told. It should have been trashier or more operatic, maybe. I dunno. It exists in that middle space of films that accurately reflect that which has little need to be reflected.
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38What could have been a juicy, pulpy noir, based loosely on the real-life 1976 Mustang Ranch love triangle involving Joe and Sally Conforte and Sally's boxer paramour, instead has the dramatic consistency of rice milk.
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33Maybe Hackford, and his screenwriter Mark Jacobson, were attempting to convey the dullness of vice. If so, they vastly overcorrected. But what about the dullness of the performances?
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25Taylor Hackford, fails to squeeze the tiniest bit of juice, sexy or comic or otherwise, out of the chintzy-libertine locale.
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30The grand Mirren is, truth be told, miscast and Pesci is misdirected as Grace and Charlie Bontempo.
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60Mirren tricked out in mid-70's pimp wear -- ahead of her time, she even brandishes a cane -- has a certain charm, but novelty alone can't keep Love Ranch's tiresome tropes and plodding storyline from dragging the film down through the Nevada dust.
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60Though based in truth, Mark Jacobson's script is built on age-old clichés. And nobody knows how to end the film, so it just fizzles out.
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25Even Helen Mirren on a bad day is better than nine out of ten American film queens polluting movie screens on any given Sunday, but really, this is one time she should have stayed in bed.
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63Mirren maintains her class throughout Love Ranch. She may deserve another Oscar just for keeping a straight face while reciting a ridiculous speech about the Donner Pass tragedy on her way to a tryst with her character's lover.
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50Mirren cuts the figure of a bodice-ripping paperback heroine, a withering desert flower who blooms in the arms of a swarthy prizefighter roughly half her age. Mirren embodies the fantasy beautifully -- but Hackford's feature-length valentine to her all but sabotages the rest of the movie.
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63"GoodFellas" Oscar winner Pesci, who hasn't appeared onscreen in a major role since 1998's "Lethal Weapon 4," is a dynamo of conflicting emotions. And Mirren, bawdy in ways that erase all memory of her award-winning role as Elizabeth II in "The Queen," is magnificent.
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0It is a colossal bomb, an epic miscalculation, an excuse for actor self-indulgence and for what sounds very much like bad improvisation.
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42So with two great, ideally cast actors and such potentially fascinating subject matter, why does Love Ranch feel like a clumsy TV movie?
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50Love Ranch bounces between tongue-in-cheek wackiness and soapy melodrama while rarely hitting a true note.
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50Thanks to the great Helen Mirren as the wife and Spanish actor Sergio Peris-Mencheta as the boxer, the film does create a convincing portrait of a late-flourishing love that takes everyone by surprise.
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30In Ms. Mirren's first film to be directed by her husband, Taylor Hackford, since "White Nights" in 1985, her formidable dramatic resources can't camouflage flat writing that eventually veers into gloppy sentimentality. At times even Ms. Mirren, who adopts a regionless American accent, seems uncomfortable.
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60A marvelous thought, credited to Orson Welles: You can handle shit with velvet gloves, but the gloves only get shittier; the shit doesn't get glovier. As wondrous as the regal Helen Mirren can be, it's a sad day when her queenly demeanor gets dunked in doo-doo.
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50A tawdry look at the early days of Nevada's legalized brothel business that plays more like Lifetime fodder than the Martin Scorsese pictures that serve as its model.
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30Hackford's pacing throughout is continuously off, with scenes extending several beats too long, his two leads adrift and bored.