Critic Reviews

Like a lesser Python entry ("The Meaning of Life"?), it's alternately brilliant and frustrating.

It's like watching "Yellow Submarine" laid over a celebrity-therapy episode of Dr. Phil.

The movie has enough weird-wild-ride brio to convince you that Chapman was indeed quite a character.

It'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).

A moving and often funny self-portrayal of Chapman that will delight Python fans.

The film's depiction of the ugliness and strangeness of his self-hating LA celeb lifestyle is disturbing. Not just for Python fans.

Unfortunately, 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.

The film only really has a pulse when it switches to live action in a few brief archival snippets, most memorably in John Cleese's appropriately outrageous eulogy for his late friend, an offering in the name of "anything for him, but mindless good taste."

The results are exactly as patchwork as that sounds, with sequences of rowdy, sacrilegious invention punctuated by long spells of tedium.

What'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.