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83Arriving amid the traditionally withered harvest of January releases, Orange County is peachy.
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80It's the new year's first happy surprise.
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75It's one of those movies like "Ghost World" and "Legally Blonde" where the description can't do justice to the experience.
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75The movie is hipper than its L.A. establishment credentials would suggest.
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70This genial comedy is as unambitious and, at times, as funny as its high concept.
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63Even if the whole of Orange County is less than the sum of its parts, Jack Black is not the only thing to like about this movie.
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63Delivers an unexpected sweetness.
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60Not only harmless, but actually quite funny and charming.
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60A feebly pleasant surprise: It's not as cheap, loud and sleazy as it might have been, but it's also too eagerly well-meaning and indistinct to really stick. It's a piece of mildly entertaining, inoffensive fluff.
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60Starts out deliriously funny but allows sentimentality to squeeze it to a pulp by the time it's over.
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60A fine group of comic performers manages to keep the screen worth looking at despite the obsessively one-note nature of this curious matchup between MTV Films and producer Scott Rudin.
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50Under different direction, Orange County might have drawn a savvy cult audience that would appreciate the black-comedy possibilities of Shaun's idolatry of a certain writing professor (Kline), the homoerotic overtones inherent in best-buddydom and pyromania as a sexual turn-on.
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50An almost successful comedy.
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50Every performer puts vigor into an otherwise limp exercise, as if word were out that this would be the last comedy ever made about late-adolescent concerns.
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50Were it not for the high profile names of "Hanks" and "Kasdan", this would be a perfect candidate for a direct-to-video release.
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50This is a picture with a perfect sense of proportion: There's a mini-Hanks, a mini-Spacek and a mini-Kasdan in a mini-comedy that's minimally entertaining.
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50Hardly the idiosyncratic Mickey Finn you'd expect from the men behind 1998's underrated "Zero Effect" and 2000's discomfort-splooge "Chuck & Buck."
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50The gags and subplots, rather than adding up to sustained hilarity, compete with each other.
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50For my money, what keeps it bearable is mainly the mugging of the older folks -- not just Jack Black, who steals the show in a part seemingly inspired by John Belushi, but Catherine O'Hara, John Lithgow, and cameos by Chevy Chase, Lily Tomlin, and Kevin Kline.
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40This ORANGE is a lemon.
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40Ultimately it lacks even the conviction of its own nastiness.
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40It's a movie at war with itself. The first half, more or less, is witty about California culture, or the lack of it, in a "Clueless" kind of way, which is a very good way.
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38Black delivers the best line (“Do you want me to get naked and start the revolution?”), and Lithgow scores a giggle for calling his ex-wife “coyote ugly” to her face, but neither of them can disguise this lemon.
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38In any case, the presence of O'Hara, Kline, Ramis, Black, Tomlin and John Lithgow (who plays Shaun's father) serve mainly to underline the feebleness of the screenplay and the slackness of the direction.
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38Flat as a Moravian cookie, flat as a sailor's wallet after a month in port, flat as the average European's impression of the Earth in A.D. 800.
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30Strictly a vanity vehicle with a mess of star babies on board. That would be just fine if it didn't take us down the same old cul-de-sac. But it does, and with a vengeance.
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25It should have been a cut above the usual teen comedy. But it touches the same old bases in the same old dumb ways.
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20The movie is less than nothing special. The movie veers between pretentiousness (oh, the plight of the instant, start-up Artist) and vacuousness.
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User score distribution:
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Positive: 14 out of 19
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Mixed: 4 out of 19
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Negative: 1 out of 19
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TomL7
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JackH.8