About a Boy is a maudlin puddle of sap that, while billed as a romantic comedy, is neither romantic nor funny.
Every character in the movie is a pale cliche: the crazy hippie, the self-absorbed yuppie, the angry single mother, the dreamy artist, the tattooed motorcycle-jacket lesbian, the nerdy kid who doesn't fit in, the playground bullies, the nose-pierced punk rocker with a heart of gold...one after another these tired stereotypes traipse across the screen, leaving a sugary slime on the ground like a slug slithering over the pavement.
There's only one real laugh in the film, and that's when Hugh Grant turns a volunteer stint working the phones at Amnesty International into an opportunity for phone sex. The rest of the movie is too pious to be funny and too concocted to be emotionally interesting.
It's extremely disheartening to read the litany of moonstruck reviews served up by those who call About a Boy an insightful examination of the contemporary male persona. Hugh Grant's shallow character doesn't have anything to do with the contemporary male persona, or any other male persona for that matter, and thank God for that.
This film is so shamelessly sentimental and badly written that I was literally hiding my face under my sweater in several places out of sheer pain and embarrassment. At other times I was praying to God for the movie to end (checking my watch sadly revealed I was only 45 minutes into the fiasco), and on a later occasion I found myself practicing Buddhist meditation techniques in order to convert the pain of viewing it into an opportunity for growth. It would indeed be fair to say that watching About a Boy is a religious experience.
If you want to see a dashing British comedy of errors about a romantic, bumbling idle young man, go rent an episode of Jeeves and Wooster. It'll beat the socks off of this sad little movie any day of the week.
Every character in the movie is a pale cliche: the crazy hippie, the self-absorbed yuppie, the angry single mother, the dreamy artist, the tattooed motorcycle-jacket lesbian, the nerdy kid who doesn't fit in, the playground bullies, the nose-pierced punk rocker with a heart of gold...one after another these tired stereotypes traipse across the screen, leaving a sugary slime on the ground like a slug slithering over the pavement.
There's only one real laugh in the film, and that's when Hugh Grant turns a volunteer stint working the phones at Amnesty International into an opportunity for phone sex. The rest of the movie is too pious to be funny and too concocted to be emotionally interesting.
It's extremely disheartening to read the litany of moonstruck reviews served up by those who call About a Boy an insightful examination of the contemporary male persona. Hugh Grant's shallow character doesn't have anything to do with the contemporary male persona, or any other male persona for that matter, and thank God for that.
This film is so shamelessly sentimental and badly written that I was literally hiding my face under my sweater in several places out of sheer pain and embarrassment. At other times I was praying to God for the movie to end (checking my watch sadly revealed I was only 45 minutes into the fiasco), and on a later occasion I found myself practicing Buddhist meditation techniques in order to convert the pain of viewing it into an opportunity for growth. It would indeed be fair to say that watching About a Boy is a religious experience.
If you want to see a dashing British comedy of errors about a romantic, bumbling idle young man, go rent an episode of Jeeves and Wooster. It'll beat the socks off of this sad little movie any day of the week.