 Envy may star Ben Stiller, Jack Black, and Christopher Walken, but it's not getting the kind of applause these three actors usually elicit. Most of the blame for the film's failure to deliver, most critics agree, falls on director Barry Levinson, another individual who usually commands esteem. Jonathan Foreman writes in the New York Post, "The mystery here is how a director like Barry Levinson ... could make such an embarrassingly unfunny black comedy." Stephen Holden in the New York Times reckons that this is Levinson's "attempt to match the Farrelly Brothers in adolescent goofiness." But Jami Bernard in the New York Daily News concludes that the result is "a mean-spirited black comedy saturated with dog-poo jokes and only intermittent yowls of mirth." Several critics observe that during the film, which revolves around an invention called the Vapoorizer, which makes dog poo disappear, characters repeatedly ask, "Where does the poo go?" -- without ever getting a reply. "Perhaps the filmmakers figured we'd just look at the screen and draw our own conclusions," writes Mark Caro in the Chicago Tribune. Or, as Geoff Pevere puts it in the Toronto Star: "The movie itself is its best answer: You're watching it." |
