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90Director Chris Columbus shrewdly brings together many of the same selling points as in his "Home Alone" movies, mixing broad comedic strokes with heavy-handed messages about the magical power of family.
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80Although the broad comedy of the first half soon gives way to a tidal wave of entirely uncalled for sentimentality, this is still a laugh riot - the sight of our hero setting fire to his falsies never fails to amuse.
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80And you will laugh till your ribs ache -- not because director Chris Columbus of the "Home Alone" movies has a gift for farce, which he does, but because Williams is to funny what the Energizer Bunny is to batteries. He keeps going and going and going.
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75Strictly speaking, it's not a top example of movie making, but it offers two hours of undeniably solid entertainment, and not too many viewers can argue with that.
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75Williams gives an inspired comic performance. Unfortunately, he outclasses the movie, which is basically a patchwork rip-off of Tootsie.
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70Most of the fun comes from seeing people fooled by what seems to us, who are in on the joke, a completely penetrable ruse. Curiously enough, what's really unpersuasive about Mrs. Doubtfire -- not to say draggy -- is its nondrag sequences.
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63But the film is not as amusing as the premise, and there were long stretches when I'd had quite enough of Mrs. Doubtfire.
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63Daniel is so hopelessly immature, and played with such puppy-dog overkill by Williams, that it's impossible to root for him--until you meet his wife, whom Sally Field makes even less appealing.
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60Williams has to break out of a second-rate "Tootsie" imitation, ankles clamped in pathos and face covered in latex. He pulls it off in the end, but it's not pretty.
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50That Mrs. Doubtfire, a Tootsie Poppins for our times, misfires in the plausibility department and mis-aims its well-meaning if muddled messages about divorce doesn't matter. [24 Nov 1993 Pg. 01.D]
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50Anyone looking for the kind of comic brio that Dustin Hoffman and company brought to "Tootsie" will not find it here. [24 Nov 1993 Pg. F1]
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50The movie's biggest challenge, one that it does not exactly meet, is to persuade the audience that this husband and father's escapade is somehow an act of love.
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But the picture as a whole isn't in the class of "Tootsie" and "Some Like It Hot," mostly because its premise is sentimental, not cynical.
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It's just raw, uncoated stupidity that sticks in your throat.
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30Now that Robin Williams has been emasculated--dangerously schizoid comic turned into nice-guy movie star--it isn't too surprising that a commercial hack like Chris Columbus would use him the way he does in this cutesy 1993 comedy: cutting between Williams trying on different voices rather than holding the camera on him as he lurches between these voices without notice.
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20Mrs. Doubtfire is overlong, barely funny, and a surprisingly bitter movie especially for a film aimed at children.
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Patrick9
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