A Life Less Ordinary

Name: A Life Less Ordinary
Genre: Drama, Fantasy, Comedy, Romance, Crime
Released: October 24, 1997
Duration: 103 min
Rating: 35
Cast: Cameron Diaz, Delroy Lindo, Ewan McGregor, Holly Hunter

1997

METASCORE

Generally unfavorable reviews based on 22 Critic Reviews

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USER SCORE

Mixed or average reviews based on 41 Ratings

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5.9

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5.9	Your Score
5.9	User Score Mixed or average reviews based on 41 Ratings

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A Life Less Ordinary

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Movie Details & Credits

Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation | Release Date: October 24, 1997 | R

Starring: Cameron Diaz, Delroy Lindo, Ewan McGregor, Holly Hunter

Summary: After being fired, an angry janitor kidnaps his boss’s spoiled daughter and finds himself on the road to romance.

Director: Danny Boyle

Genre(s): Drama, Fantasy, Comedy, Romance, Crime

Rating: R

Runtime: 103 min

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Critic Reviews

Stephanie Zacharek

Gloriously excessive, passionate and messy, A Life Less Ordinary is the kind of picture that's becoming more and more of a rarity in the landscape of American movies: a love story with a hard-on. Read full review

James Berardinelli

From start to finish, A Life Less Ordinary feels like a group of sometimes amusing, sometimes clever, and sometimes tedious skits forced to fit together. Read full review

Dave Kehr

This aggressively "sincere" movie is without a single authentically lived moment a sense exaggerated by Brian Tufano's overcomposed cinematography, which imitates the glossy hollowness of fashion photographs. [24Oct1997 Pg 51]

Roger Ebert

The film expends enormous energy to tell a story that is tedious and contrived. Read full review

Richard Schickel

But that's the thing about this movie. It never leaves well enough, or good enough, alone. It keeps looking--sometimes a little too hard--for ways to transform the ordinary into the discomfiting. Read full review

Dallas Observer Peter Rainer

What's missing is romance. Despite the engaging friskiness of its two stars, the film is romantically vapid. Watching it is like trying to warm up to a hologram. Read full review

Owen Gleiberman

The real problem is the movie itself. The plot, with its interlocking contrivances, is like a machine that keeps trapping the actors in its gears. Since they aren't allowed to relate to each other on a simple human level, the spangly back-and-forth chemistry on which a romantic comedy depends is nowhere in sight. Read full review

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User Reviews

fleetingshadow

Dec 12, 2015

A Life Less Ordinary isn't a romantic comedy, which is likely where all of the mainstream critics came unhitched in their appraisals. It's a dark comedy/farce with a romantic aspect to it, which is rather surreal.

In other words, it's a screwball comedy. If you're expecting a traditionalA Life Less Ordinary isn't a romantic comedy, which is likely where all of the mainstream critics came unhitched in their appraisals. It's a dark comedy/farce with a romantic aspect to it, which is rather surreal.

In other words, it's a screwball comedy. If you're expecting a traditional romantic comedy, you're going to come unstuck here.

So instead of relying on the advice of the critics, give this movie a chance.Ewan McGregor puts in a solid performance, as does Cameron Diaz. It makes and excellently light counterpoint to the two previous Hodges/MacDonald/Boyle movies - Shallow Grave and Trainspotting.

Holly Hunter and Delroy Lindo pretty much steal the show though.… Expand

1 of 1 users found this helpful10

MovieMasterEddy

Apr 2, 2016

After their accelerated rise with “Shallow Grave” and “Trainspotting,” the Brit trio of helmer Danny Boyle, producer Andrew Macdonald and writer John Hodge hit some major speed bumps with “A Life Less Ordinary.” This offbeat comedy-romancer centered on a clumsy kidnapper and his ambitiousAfter their accelerated rise with “Shallow Grave” and “Trainspotting,” the Brit trio of helmer Danny Boyle, producer Andrew Macdonald and writer John Hodge hit some major speed bumps with “A Life Less Ordinary.” This offbeat comedy-romancer centered on a clumsy kidnapper and his ambitious female victim is a pleasant enough ride in parts, but has too many half-realized ideas in the script to satisfy at any emotional level, and fails to make a virtue of its mixed British-American cast.

After the highly stylized earlier films, which married visual invention to strong, dialogue-driven scripts, Boyle & Co. faced the daunting task of fulfilling expectations raised by the first two pics while managing a gentle course correction toward stylistic pastures more fertile in the long term. The film’s opening reel, which has a designed but not over-the-top feel, raises hopes they’ve succeeded, but a feeling thereafter grows of the filmmakers covering all their bases rather than confidently striking out in a fresh direction. Part kooky romance, part screwball comedy, part quirky fantasy and part Roadrunner cartoon, this is a movie that has everything except an involving storyline and characters.

In a clear nod to the British classic “Stairway to Heaven” (co-directed, coincidentally, by Macdonald’s grandfather, Emeric Pressburger), the picture kicks off in an overexposed, all-white heaven with an almost ’60s feel, visualized in this case as a U.S. police precinct where Chief Gabriel (Dan Hedaya), under pressure from the Man Above to “unite men and women,” dispatches angels O’Reilly (Holly Hunter) and Jackson (Delroy Lindo) to bring together two earthlings.

Their targets couldn’t be more dissimilar: Celine (Cameron Diaz) is a pampered businessman’s daughter, while Robert (Ewan McGregor) is a young Scot who works as a janitor in her dad’s corporation and dreams of writing a bestselling trash novel about Marilyn Monroe and JFK’s love child.

When Robert, in rapid succession, is pink-slipped, dumped by his girlfriend (K.K. Dodds) and thrown out of his lodgings, he storms into the office of Celine’s dad, the ruthless Naville (Ian Holm), and in a confused melee ends up shooting him in the leg and kidnapping Celine at gunpoint.

The twist is that Celine hates her father and, quickly realizing Robert is no real threat, schools the klutzy Scot in bargaining techniques to extract a major amount of green and gain her freedom. In one of the script’s curious developments, O’Reilly and Lindo persuade Naville to hire them (why?) to track down the duo. This leads to various antics as the money handover is bungled, Celine robs a bank when she finds her father has canceled her credit card, and Naville and his henchman (Ian McNeice) turn up to take matters into their own hands.

There’s no shortage of ideas in Hodge’s busy script, but less would have translated into more — and would have helped the movie find a consistent tone. Hunter and Lindo’s characters raise plenty of opportunities for knockabout comedy and cartoony action — with Hunter doing a way-out Walter Brennan impersonation, and later turning into a kind of female Terminator — but they could just as easily have been eliminated from the script without any loss to the plot.

Another idea that only fitfully works is that of playing the story as a ’90s screwball comedy, with the two mismatched leads thrown together by circumstances not of their making. Some scenes are genuinely funny, but in general the film’s tempo and Hodge’s dialogue are neither brisk enough nor full of sufficiently sharp one-liners to realize this ambition.

Fact is, the humor is basically very British in tone (Hodge originally intended to set the story in the U.K. and France), and often sounds more natural in McGregor’s mouth than in Diaz’s. Of the American players, only Tony Shalhoub, in a bit as a barman friend of Robert’s, catches the comic, faux-literary tone. Almost as good is Stanley Tucci, as one of Celine’s suitors, but his brief role is more a plot device than a properly integrated character.

As the naive Scottish dreamer adrift in America’s wide-open spaces, McGregor is very good, with boyish appeal to spare. The weakness in this particular equation is Diaz, who, though very cute in her Versace duds, never unbends sufficiently to make their screen chemistry catch fire.

At base, “A Life Less Ordinary” offers some moments of real fun and a few of genuine inspiration. But the simple, and potentially affecting, comedy-romance lying at its heart rarely gets a chance to stand tall amid the crossfire of mismatched ideas.… Expand

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96	#96 Most Discussed Movie of 1997
95	#95 Most Shared Movie of 1997