St. Vincent

2014 comedy

Rating: 10/20

Plot: The touching story of a kid from a broken home, his busy mother, a pregnant stripper/prostitute, and Vincent, a cantankerous, drunkardly, gambling shell of a man.

This feels tired from the first minute and then languidly stumbles along predictably for another hour and a half or so. Very paint-by-numbers stuff here but with performers trying some different things. Unfortunately, none of those things work. Melissa McCarthy takes on a more human character and is fine although any female actress at all could have substituted for her without anybody noticing. Naomi Watts can't pull off the Russian-whore-with-a-heart-of-gold, something that would be a cliche if I could think of a single other example of the character type. And Bill Murray is just awful in a movie that he just didn't need to be in. He's got a wavering Brooklynite accent that, even at it's very best, doesn't quite sound like something Bill Murray should be doing. Murray seems to be going through the motions here, almost like he's trying to see if his face wrinkles can handle things on their own. And then, a little over halfway through the movie, the writer finds a way to make his performance even worse by giving the character a life-altering medical issue. Moments become laughable but for exactly the wrong reasons. Murray does get a nifty dance scene, but it's to Jefferson Airplane's "Somebody to Love," a song which already had all the laughs squeezed out of it for a Jim Carrey movie. At least the kid was good. Murray's always worked well with kids, and Jaeden Lieberher and he have a good rapport. The dialogue they were given doesn't always help them out much although I did laugh once during a conversation about Hitler. Surprisingly, it was Lieberher's delivery that did it though, not Murray. This movie reeks of sentimentality, goes exactly where you think it will go at each step of the way, and is about as deep as a kiddie pool after a brief rain shower. And it's got Wilco songs (well, Jeff Tweedy), and Wilco is a group I hate even more than I hate the fucking Eagles (man).