Drowning Mona

Boston Globe Jay Carr

Executed on a pretty broad level, but if characterization is slighted, the ensemble is so rich, with such depth, that every few minutes another juicy turn keeps coming our way to divert us.

Seattle Post-Intelligencer Paula Nechak

Scores high on nastiness, but it has as many surprisingly funny moments as offensive ones.

Baltimore Sun Ann Hornaday

A murder caper that could have been written by Agatha Christie during a pub-crawl.

Mr. Showbiz Michael Atkinson

Follows a predictable low-comedy path, but does it with such fierce appeal and beautifully wrought wit that it doesn't feel quite like any comedy American theaters have seen since the equally underrated "Grosse Pointe Blank."

New York Post Lou Lumenick

Tasteless but sporadically uproarious black comedy.

Los Angeles Times Kevin Thomas

With a hilarious script and capable cast, the film puts a clever spin on the everyone-is-a-suspect plot.

Miami Herald Rene Rodriguez

Has a made-for-TV smallness (it will probably be a big hit on cable), and it never quite vanquishes the nagging suspicion that you could be spending your time better elsewhere.

Philadelphia Inquirer Gary Thompson

It can be broadly funny when it does not lapse into lazy "Dukes of Hazzard" caricature, which is often.

Entertainment Weekly Lisa Schwarzbaum

The actors more eager to goof around in schlumpfy costumes on a low-budget lark than to play their trashy characters with the seriousness such farce requires.

Chicago Sun-Times Roger Ebert

My problem was that I didn't care who killed Mona Dearly, or why, and didn't want to know anyone in town except for Chief Rash and his daughter.

Portland Oregonian Bob Thomas

The ensemble actors give it their all, and that's as it should be in an absurdist comedy of this sort.

Rolling Stone Peter Travers

Tries for deadpan laughs but is merely lifeless.

Chicago Tribune Michael Wilmington

A comedy murder mystery gone seriously astray, boasts an immensely talented cast .

Austin Chronicle Marjorie Baumgarten

Each of the characters is dull and boorish instead of witty and urbane.

San Francisco Examiner Wesley Morris

There are enough mullets to win this movie a Stanley Cup.

New York Daily News Jami Bernard

Excuse me, but didn't Bette Midler already play this role?

San Francisco Chronicle Mick LaSalle

A funny comedy for about 90 seconds. Then Bette Midler goes off a cliff.

USA Today Susan Wloszczyna

The bad-taste murder farce is just an excuse for a bunch of actors to go slumming and ride about in - ha, ha - Yugos.

Salon.com Charles Taylor

The movie is flat-footed, and the pacing gives you time to rest between laughs.

TV Guide Maitland McDonagh

Is there anything so painful as a comedy whose every gag falls flat and then lies there, flopping like a dying flounder?

LA Weekly Manohla Dargis

The only vaguely funny moments are courtesy William Fichtner, as the dead woman's husband, and Jamie Lee Curtis in full metal drag as his furtive squeeze.

Time Richard Schickel

There's a definite limit to the number of moron jokes we can absorb in 100 minutes, and their movie exceeds it.

Village Voice Amy Taubin

Bette Midler and Danny De Vito mug more shamelessly than usual.

Film.com Gemma Files

An endlessly contrived exercise in self-referential "black comedy", can't help but strike me as no kind of triumph of anything over anything.

Slate David Edelstein

The script plays goofy games, stopping the action for Tarantino-style small talk; piling on alternate, "Rashomon"-style flashbacks; and divulging its characters' secrets in no particular order.

The New York Times A.O. Scott

A dreary crash of malapropisms and slapstick maimings wrapped very loosely around a murder mystery.

Washington Post Desson Thomson

I watched Mona. I felt like drowning.

Film.com Sean Means

One imagines what the failed farce Drowning Mona would have been like in the hands of the Coen brothers.

Chicago Reader Jonathan Rosenbaum

I didn't laugh once.

Dallas Observer Gregory Weinkauf

With a sneer and a wink, Drowning Mona plunges us into a fresh deluge of idiotic Americana .

Newsweek Ted Gideonse

As dumb as the film is, the actors escape relatively unscathed.

Variety Todd McCarthy

A white-trash black comedy, a caustic working-class whodunit in which the solution to the murder mystery takes a distant back seat to countless barbs and jibes tossed in the direction of the mostly imbecilic cast of characters.