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80The Grand is a fast and furious comedic attack that begs to be seen again. There's just so much going on, it's nearly impossible to keep up.
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75Nearly every actor has his or her moments of hilarity, but it's the surprises, like Herzog's terrific turn as a bunny-loving sadist, that make the biggest impact.
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75Delivers plenty of sharply funny moments.
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75The interpersonal dynamics haven't been scripted out very thoughtfully, so as the final 20 minutes wind down, it becomes increasingly tough for Penn and his talented cast to mine humor from a story that mandates they actually play elimination rounds of poker.
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75What makes The Grand a memorable comedy is that the main stories are really about families – how they screw you up and how they save you. And you don't have to understand poker to know the rules of that game.
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75While not a grand-slam comedy, the offbeat humor and easy byplay gives The Grand a winning hand.
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70What The Grand lacks in originality it more than makes up for with its high percentage of funny moments.
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70The Grand is a seesaw, but the setting--the high-stakes poker subculture--is remarkably fertile and the actors are a treat.
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It has a lot of affection for its screwy characters, and it has a cast worth watching even when the plot's held captive by a bunch of boring cards.
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67The year's big dramatic gambling hit, 21, is all plot, no personality; The Grand, a comedy that follows six contenders into the finals of a poker tournament, is all personality, no plot. I'll take personality.
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63The Grand is in the grand tradition of Christopher Guest "mockumentary" comedy satires: Its greatest asset is its eclectic, quirky-funny cast.
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60The actors certainly look as if they're having a good time, and if you're in the right mood, you might too.
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60Safer, more conventional and closer to broad TV sketch humor than Christopher Guest's comedies of manners, The Grand never quite recoups in laughs what it loses in spontaneity.
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Wildly uneven but often quite funny, The Grand allows its actors to act out, get the "E!" out of their systems and give the Christopher Guest treatment to professional gambling without Christopher Guest, with whom it would have been funnier and a lot more acerbic.
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58There are small pleasures, but not many. It especially underwhelms when you consider how Penn seemed to have found a new paradigm for this now-hoary comic form.
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58Typical of bad improv, the inmates take over the asylum, leaving a movie that's little more than a loose, wildly uneven assemblage of individual comedic shtick.
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50A defective poker comedy where the poker is a lot more interesting than the people playing it.
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50There's a lot of truly hilarious material in The Grand.
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50Each of these improv farceurs wins a few laughs. But not enough.
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40Lacks any sort of urgency or inner propulsion; the actors do their little goofs, then hand them off to the next, lending the jest the frolicking but ultimately monotonous quality of a game of tag.
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38Well, nobody said The Grand was another "Best in Show."
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It's hard to believe that a lineup so stellar could generate so few laughs, but there it is.
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25The performers don't really seem at the top of their game here.
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User Score
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No user score yet- Awaiting 1 more rating
User score distribution:
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Positive: 2 out of 3
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Mixed: 1 out of 3
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Negative: 0 out of 3
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ChadS.7
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CoolmonkS.7
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JayH.5Semi mockumentary, not really all that funny. I never found it immensely engrossing. Amusing at times but it doesn't stand out in any way.