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Warren Beatty's Bulworth, which has a limited opening today before rolling out in the path of Godzilla next week, is receiving a mixed reception. Rod Dreher in the New York Post calls it "an audacious, highly original attempt to critique contemporary American politics, but one ultimately wasted by its preachiness, dramatic incoherence and infantile limousine leftism." Mike Clark in USA Today calls the film "90 percent triumph." Although he calls the ending a "letdown," Clark says that "even its weakest moments surpass anything in the flaccid film of Primary Colors, which for starters didn't have Beatty in the comic performance of his career." Bob Strauss in the Los Angeles Daily News has only unmitigated praise for the film, calling it "a visual as well as a verbal tour de force." Across town, in the Los Angeles Times, Kenneth Turan takes a middle ground, calling the film "a chaotic but somehow endearing mishmash ... an amusing, self-consciously outrageous attempt at a shotgun marriage between knockabout comedy and serious political commentary." The New York Times' Janet Maslin casts her vote in Beatty's favor, writing that he turns the film "into the kind of imaginative, anything-goes escapade that movie audiences, in the days before the pre-sold, prefab blockbuster, had the luxury of taking in stride." |
