- Critic Score
- Most active
- Publication
- Most clicked
-
75A perfect vehicle for Robin Williams. He again plays the compassionate, manic clown that has been his main character throughout his movie career. And audiences love his wild end runs.
-
60So the prognosis is generally positive, though there may be a touch too much sugar in this motion picture panacea, which is, in places, shamelessly sentimental to an extraordinarily manipulative degree.
-
60Williams is a great clown, and Oedekirk and Shadyac give him room to really cut loose, and cure the movie. That’s as it should be.
-
60Shamelessly sappy and emotionally manipulative, Patch Adams is an aggressively heartwarming comedy-drama that may be roasted by critics but embraced by ticketbuyers.
-
50The movie starts with insights about the need for more humane values in health care, then buries them under an avalanche of frivolities, vulgarities, and clichés.
-
Could have been maudlin from start to finish. Instead, more than half the 154-minute film is riveting - filled with funny, touching bits that don't stoop to cheap sentimentality.
-
50The kind of film that will work for an audience that's just interested in having an emotional experience (with a happy ending) without caring how obviously or clumsily they are manipulated. I find this sort of sledgehammer film making to be offensive, but there are those who enjoy it.
-
40The film begins to resemble the dramatic equivalent of a porno movie, with emotional orgasms spewing forth at a rapid clip. By the time Patch Adams reaches its narrative climax, it has long since shot its dramatic load.
-
Williams knows when material is working, and he knows the sound of an honestly aroused crowd. This ain't it!
-
40Low humor might count for more here if it weren't constantly overshadowed by the film's maudlin streak.
-
40The perfectly acceptable shtick executed by Williams--whose I-know-you-better-than-you-know-yourself seduction techniques ought to make him a hotter leading man--occasionally justifies the relentlessly light tone of this preachy 1998 comedy-drama.
-
38Made me want to spray the screen with Lysol. This movie is shameless. It's not merely a tearjerker. It extracts tears individually by liposuction, without anesthesia.
-
30Williams isn't really playing Adams: He's once again playing himself, and the act is getting tired.
-
30If laughter is the best medicine, Patch Adams is but a sugary, fitfully amusing placebo.
-
Patch Adams is either a brilliantly sly, straight-faced parody of the standard Robin Williams tearjerker or the soggiest movie of the season. [24 December 1998, p. 29]
-
25Patch Adams is a flawed visionary, but surely he deserves better than this crass and manipulative movie.
-
20This shameless piece of sentimentality is indignantly on the side of feelings and spontaneity and against coldhearted technique, as if those were the only two choices in training doctors.
-
0Audiences may find this pap brimming with heart and sympathy for the little guy, but as prescriptions go, Patch Adams is pure placebo.
-
0Oooh, this is toxic.
-
0The year's most repugnant movie.
-
0There should be a special room in Hell where the makers of films like Patch Adams are sent.
prev
next
Page:
- 1
User score distribution:
-
Positive: 9 out of 17
-
Mixed: 0 out of 17
-
Negative: 8 out of 17
-
This review contains spoilers, click full review link to view.
-
LukeW9VERY underrated excellent movie.
-
Harry10