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83The Joneses turns out to be a smart little comedy that tosses some sharp little darts at our consumer-driven culture.
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75The beauty of The Joneses is that the salesmen are as much the victims as the people they're deceiving.
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75The Joneses manages a deft blend of the sexy, the sad and the silly. And Borte doles out his secrets and surprises in ways that make it easy to keep up with these Joneses.
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75Before it gives itself a chance to deliver on that promise, however, it morphs into something different -- something often resembling a soap opera, just with prettier sets and less-passionate smooching.
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75Surprising, inventive and crisply, merrily written and directed by Derrick Borte, The Joneses is a brisk, captivating entertainment. Think Ozzie and Harriet on speed.
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75Except for slipping on a third-act soapbox, The Joneses is a deft allegory of the greed and coveting that led to the recession. At times, you wonder if something like this scam could really happen, or does.
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70A sharp sendup of suburban conformity and American materialism, The Joneses does burn through its credit by the end. But it's flashy enough to catch our eye, and keep our interest nearly all the way through.
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63Though it's entertaining when the tone is light, The Joneses can't quite keep up with this sort of complexity.
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63Crass materialism and ridiculous marketing ploys are skewered by writer/director Derrick Borte in this uneven cautionary tale that starts off incisively funny, then devolves into preachiness.
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Unfortunately, the movie's second half drags, never again achieving the first half's level of narrative dexterity.
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63Solid performances from David Duchovny (in a cleaned-up version of his Californication character), Demi Moore (defying age), Ben Hollingsworth, and Amber Heard can't save the movie when the screenplay goes as limp as a noodle and turns into a long string of clichés.
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63The spoof of consumerism scores some predictable points, but the tidy ending is a sell-out to the ultimate marketing machine: Hollywood.
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60A meta-satire that doesn't quite come off.
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60His (Borte) film would have been much better had it stuck to its guns as social commentary and not lapsed into a predictable, and predictably lame, love story.
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60Borte supports his jewel of a story idea with dead-on casting, stunning images and product placement that's intentionally heavy-handed.
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The ending feels a bit rushed and incongruous, but the film never leaves behind the humanity of its characters.
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58This cautionary tale might be easier to swallow if all that stuff didn't look like it came from a Sky Mall catalog.
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58The inevitable breakdown on this commercial façade might have led The Joneses into more disturbing territory, but Borte goes the other direction, away from jagged comedy and toward well-meaning homilies. No sale.
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50What could have been a biting black comedy taking product placement to the logical extreme instead is so obviously predictable that even a savvy cast led by David Duchovny and Demi Moore can't sell it.
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50Either this is a tragic family or a satirical one, and the film seems uncertain which way to jump.
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50Duchovny and Moore have their moments; they're like two preening sharks working on commission.
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50An overobvious and underwhelming satire about American consumerism run amok.
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50It's cute and clever to a point -- especially if you don't know much about the film's premise going in -- but then the cleverness runs on like the one-note punch line of an interminable "Saturday Night Live'' sketch, sponsored by Audi.
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50Borte may have lost his way on this film, but there is one thing he has done for America: He has demonstrated the correct way of spelling the plural of the surname Jones. Grammarians, if few others, will be satisfied.
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What plays hard and dark for the film's first half goes squishy and blindingly bright as calamity and then outright tragedy lead to the saw-it-coming resolution writer-director Derrick Borte thinks is more sincere than it actually plays.
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50As the shills reveal their souls, the movie turns into an exercise in the very phoniness it initially set out to expose. And since you've already paid for the ticket, you might end up feeling cheated.
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50If The Joneses were pure farce, which it isn't, Borte could have gotten away with a lot. Likewise, the picture might have succeeded if it were all a bit funnier and a little less mean-spirited about spending, debt and envy.
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50Writer-director Derrick Borte brings a heavy hand to the comedy and an even heavier one to the drama.
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The spot-on cast almost holds the movie together, but whatever potential this timely premise has is wasted on reworking the same gag about overconsumption.
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38Slick as a pig and reeking of phony sympathy for recession-wracked consumers, The Joneses is a black comedy about stealth marketing made by a filmmaker who's evidently much too close to the subject to bite the hand that feeds him.
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