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Jul 1, 201250As usual, it's Banks, who's turning great performances in lousy movies into some kind of brilliant career strategy.
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50People Like Us is neither optimal nor prime.
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50Pine and the always-watchable Banks make the best of a bad screenplay, but People Like Us gives us nothing that we can relate to.
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50The most interesting plot development – Frankie starts falling for Sam – is nipped in the bud. Some things even a soap opera won't stoop to.
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38The considerable talents of Banks make the movie bearable.
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0This is the sort of movie that ends up awash in sincere revelations, and not a moment of it feels remotely believable.
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50The movie's soap opera quality undermines its efforts to tell a family saga with much believability.
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25No matter how well made, well acted and well intentioned, Lying Dingbat Procrastinator movies are excruciating to watch. Case in point: People Like Us, a film hell-bent on dragging its protagonist (and, sadly, us) through the LDP narrative playbook.
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60If its tone is considerably tougher than that of movies adapted from Nicholas Sparks novels, it is still a grown-up soap opera. And as the overly determined plot progresses, it feels increasingly Sparks-like, although there are no dewy young lovebirds to swoon over.
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Jun 28, 201260It's a soapy, predictable ride where everyone learns about the importance of family. And though it's just a Christmas tree away from being a holiday special, the stellar cast wrings just enough genuine emotion out of a stale premise to make it mostly sweet.
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40Going on too long seems to be the disease of the week; it's certainly what brings this movie down, though the going on here stems from a surfeit of implausible plot that suffocates the main characters and the excellent actors who play them.
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63It's the flaws that Kurtzman builds into People Like Us that make it interesting.
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60Its hard sell wears you down and draws you in, even as you know you're being manipulated.
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70The movie develops into a painful story of one generation inflicting its selfish compromises on the next. The three leads are uniformly excellent, and the strong supporting cast includes Mark Duplass and Philip Baker Hall.
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67The movie is well-acted and a bit frustrating, but also a pleasant little surprise.
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60The glossily photographed family drama People Like Us is not without appeal, but it has a major construction flaw. It's dramatic arc is predicated on the problem of accidental incestuous attraction. Egads.
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50A fine and moving film could be made from this story, which was inspired, loosely, by events and situations in the lives of Kurtzman and Orci. But the script sets an awfully low bar for Sam's redemption.
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63Pine is driven and touchingly vulnerable. And Banks, heartbreakingly good, nails every nuance in a raw wound of a role. Thanks to their teamwork, we believe we are watching people like us.
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50For all its emotional and familial kerfuffles, People Like Us is an honorable misfire – good intentions and all.
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58Viewers who dislike movies in which all drama hinges on one character withholding information from another for no reason beyond the need to keep the plot chugging along should stay far away from People Like Us. The film does have its charms, but getting to them means seeing past a Buick-sized contrivance.
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25An irritatingly contrived drama.
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63Sam and Frankie are certainly interesting enough that a film about them coming to grips with this hidden truth would have been justified. It also would probably have been harder to write than this one, so People Like Us marches on with a coy little smile, toying with Frankie and the audience.
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85This is a straightforward family comedy-drama, a movie made for adults, and one that actually gives its actors – among them Chris Pine, Elizabeth Banks, Michelle Pfeiffer and Philip Baker Hall – something to do. That's more of a rarity on today's landscape than it should be.
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58People Like Us demonstrates how a drama can be heartfelt and bogus at the same time.
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75This is a rare feel-good treat that nudges the heartstrings and makes you feel optimistic about the human race.
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40The pity is that the people in People Like Us ultimately don't feel any more dimensional than the archetypes dutifully dotting his lowest-denominator multiplex fodder. He's just picked a different set of clichés to ransack.
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40Ultimately, however, People Like Us is infected with the "life-affirming" pox; this means making a narrative priority of redeeming everyone before adequately explaining them.
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12This dry-as-dust enterprise bogs down in an almost total lack of energy and imagination that no amount of faux earnestness can overcome.
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80This film stands out as one of the year's best.
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70As overcranked as it is -- the film is directed as if it were an action drama, with two or three times more cuts than necessary -- People Like Us has a persuasive emotional pull at its heart that's hard to deny.
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60If they never fully sell the situation, the actors nonetheless deliver strong, emotionally accessible work.