 Mr. Woodcock is the name of Billy Bob Thornton's character in the film, a high-school gym teacher who haunts the memories of his former students. One of them, as it turns out, is the character played by Seann William Scott, author of a self-help book advising readers to let go of the past. Arriving in his hometown to be honored, he discovers that his mother, played by Susan Sarandon, has taken up with Mr. Woodcock. "It's a character-centered story that's a little sluggishly paced but keeps the chuckles coming at about the pace of a good sitcom," is the rather mild reaction of Kyle Smith in the New York Post. Not so mild is the reaction of Susan Walker in the Toronto Star, who observes, "Thornton is starring in what appears to be a vehicle predicated on his typecasting as a vulgar, cruel, authoritarian character capable of the withering put-down." Janice Page in the Boston Globe remarks that "the film logs almost all of its laughs when it's at its crudest, meanest, and most unfiltered. Everything else -- and that is to say most of the movie -- is a big, fat, derivative waste of time." Several writers have taken note of the fact that it has taken a long while for the film to get a release date. "This thing has been sitting on a shelf for a year or so, and it's easy to see why," writes Bob Strauss in the Los Angeles Daily News. "Plot's dopey, timing's a mess." Roger Ebert refers to a recent Los Angeles Times article that indicated that the film went through three weeks of reshoots before the studio decided to release it. Still, he suggests, it's worth seeing for Thornton's performance alone. "The thing about Thornton is, he makes no compromises and takes no prisoners when he plays guys like Woodcock," Ebert writes. "He's a hateful bastard, and he means it. That makes the movie better, actually, than if we sensed a heart of gold under the crust, but it doesn't exactly make it funnier." And that may be just the problem, Claudia Puig suggests in USA Today. "This may be the most laugh-free comedy of the year," she writes. |
