 The musical Idlewild, starring André 3000 and Big Boi of the hip-hop group OutKast, is receiving a lot of discordant reviews. Typical is Elizabeth Weitzman's in the New York Daily News. "Here's the good news," she writes, the film "has all the wit and creativity of [OutKast's] music videos. And here's the bad news: That makes it at least an hour too long." Similarly, Lou Lumenick writes in the New York Post that the film is "basically a series of music videos -- a few quite good -- strung together over two long hours and loosely connected by a weak story line loaded with anachronisms." Claudia Puig also takes a similar tack in her review in USA Today, writing, "The concept of blending hip-hop and elaborately choreographed dance numbers into a 1930s crime drama/love story is one of the most inventive of any movie this year. But by jumbling genres, fashions, music and locales, and riddling bullets through much of it, Idlewild ends up feeling disjointed and disquieting." Bob Strauss in the Los Angeles Daily News calls the film "too predictable and too weird." And Manohla Dargis in the New York Times remarks that the movie "just twitches and stumbles." |
