45
Metascore
15 reviews · Provided by Metacritic.com
- 75New York PostKyle SmithNew York PostKyle SmithLike a lesser Python entry ("The Meaning of Life"?), it's alternately brilliant and frustrating.
- 67Entertainment WeeklyOwen GleibermanEntertainment WeeklyOwen GleibermanIt's like watching "Yellow Submarine" laid over a celebrity-therapy episode of Dr. Phil.
- 60Village VoiceVillage VoiceThe movie has enough weird-wild-ride brio to convince you that Chapman was indeed quite a character.
- 60The New York TimesManohla DargisThe New York TimesManohla DargisIt's a colorful patchwork of family high and low points, schoolboy days, professional triumphs and assorted epiphanies (including sex with women followed by sex with men).
- 50Portland OregonianMarc MohanPortland OregonianMarc MohanUnfortunately, it just doesn't come together. The animation ranges from crude approximations of Terry Gilliam's cutout style to borderline puerility, and the entire enterprise strives far too desperately for the sort of irreverence that Chapman could conjure with a cock of his pipe-clenching head.
- 42The A.V. ClubNoel MurrayThe A.V. ClubNoel MurrayWhat's missing from this movie is any of that sense of what made Chapman so important, or why he was so often at the center of Monty Python's best skits and movies, up until his death from cancer at 48.
- 40Time OutJoshua RothkopfTime OutJoshua RothkopfA coda shifts to video footage of Cleese's irreverent eulogy; you wish the whole film could have been as slyly somber. It's what the colonel would have insisted upon.
- 40New York Daily NewsJoe NeumaierNew York Daily NewsJoe NeumaierJohn Cleese, Michael Palin and Chapman himself (courtesy of interviews, skits and various recordings he made before his death from cancer in 1989) chime in. It's an odd little trip, but if it weren't, one would have to ask, "Well what's all this, then?"
- Feels like a failure on all fronts - unpleasant to look at, needlessly in 3D, drearily unfunny and worst of all an incomplete portrait of the person to whom it is ostensibly paying tribute.
- 0Slant MagazineSlant MagazineGraham Chapman's story, frankly, is better served by his Wikipedia page.