 In Head of State, Chris Rock asks the question, can a black candidate win a presidential election? Most critics conclude that he doesn't answer it. A.O. Scott in the New York Times calls the movie, "a political comedy that refuses to address a single real political topic." Lou Lumenick in the New York Post describes the film's political satire as "toothless" and wonders why the studio, DreamWorks, wanted to make it. Michael Sragow in the Baltimore Sun comments that the film "has such a thin, watered-down texture that even its knockabout farce evaporates before your eyes." Contemplating Rock's apparent unwillingness to take a satirical stand on any matter in the film, the Boston Globe critic Ty Burr, comments: "It's a shame, because when Rock clicks, there isn't a funnyman who can approach him for jabbing our deepest social wounds with an anger that almost touches joy." On the other hand, Joe Morgenstern in the Wall Street Journal is willing to excuse Rock, who wrote, directed, and stars in the movie, for the film's shortcomings. He says that the movie offers "silliness of such a special grade, performed with such zest, that it makes you forgive and even forget the movie's foolishness and borderline incoherence." And John Anderson of Newsday thinks Rock owes no apologies at all, remarking: "It's not just flattery to say that Chris Rock's Head of State is the most hilarious pure comedy since the wheels-up landing of Airplane! in 1980." Mick LaSalle in the San Francisco Chronicle won't go that far. But he does call it "a pleasing and occasionally very funny movie that maintains a mild but consistent hold on its audience." |
