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DokBrowne [ 4.0 ]
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Not as fatally generic as "Silver Linings Playbook", but compared to "American Hustle", "I Heart Huckabees", "The Fighter", "Flirting with Disaster", and especially "Three Kings" this feels insignificant and uninspired; David O. Russell switching on the autopilot and hoping both Jennifer Lawrence's star power and his own renewed cache as a lauded, audience-friendly auteur will create the illusion of thrilling substance.
Underneath the mandatory DOR flourishes, like restless cinematography, music montages, and alternately broad and nuanced characterizations, this is simply a rags-to-riches biopic that doesn't seem sure of what to focus on. Some parts take too long to make a basic point, others fast-forward through what could be the meat of a story, and we've seen enough of these famous-person life stories contortoed to pass the checklist in a Screenwriting-101 handbook to know that (spoilers) the climactic victory where she outsmarts a rival company trying to ruin her is probably bullshit wish fulfillment fiction at best, or at least feels a lot like a weakly contrived excuse for a conclusion.
Not to sound jaded, but it seems like Russell heard about the story of the QVC entrepeneur and thought "damn, we could get an Oscar-winning hit out of this with our hands tied behind our backs!" Either that or he was looking for another project to further flatter and exalt his muse Jennifer Lawrence, and instead of challenging himself to invent an interesting female character, reached out for the low-hanging fruit of yet another real-life success story. This kind of movie has been made way too many times to justify this flat new variation on it. It leans too much on Lawrence, who can be good but isn't as versatile and powerful an actress as she's been hyped to be, and worse, it waters down Russell's talents to a wasteful degree. Maybe it's about time Russell found some other actors to obsess over
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| Weighted Rating | : 6.1 |
| No. Ratings | : 2 | |
| No. Reviews | : 1 | |
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