Doc Hollywood

Doc Hollywood is the rare film that actually improves as it develops. What begins as an all-too-standard fish-out-of-water comedy eventually grows into something more. [02 Aug 1991, p.4]

I was expecting Doc Hollywood to be a comedy. And it is a comedy. But it surprised me by also being a love story, and a pretty good one - the kind where the lovers are smart enough to know all the reasons why they shouldn't get together, but too much in love to care.

Predictable as sunburn on the 4th of July, it is a film as ingratiating as its star. Visiting the town of Grady is a fairly pleasant pastime, but there's no excuse for a film this light to last over two hours as this one does.

Has no real taste of its own, but, in its mildness and predictability, offers the reassurance of a fast-food or motel chain.

Doc Hollywood has its moments, including some nice comic turns by Barnard Hughes as a curmudgeonly doctor, Bridget Fonda as the local coquette and David Ogden Stiers as Grady's folksy mayor. And Julie Warner is certainly hot stuff. But Caton-Jones' approach is too facile, and his use of Southern-cracker cliches too offensive, to capture my vote. [02 Aug 1991, p.D1]

Corny and sweet, Doc Hollywood has its genuine charms, but they'd be a lot more charming if Caton-Jones and the screen-writers allowed them to sneak up on us. Instead, the movie oversells its whimsy and fits its quirkiness into a sitcom formula that's as preordained as the hero's moral rejuvenation.

This comedy, directed by Michael Caton-Jones, is as stalled as Fox's Porsche. It's too flat to be funny and too trite to be meaningful.