Critic Reviews

If you want to make an indie comedy, watch and study Eat Wheaties!

Tony Hale took neurotic brilliance to the next level on Arrested Development and then Veep, and he’s squarely in his comfort zone playing another cringe-inducing, socially awkward and hilariously tone-deaf character in the offbeat charmer Eat Wheaties!, one of the most endearing movies about light stalking you’ll ever see.

Tony Hale makes an interesting “Variation on a Character Played by Steve Carell,” and there are a few laughs mixed in with a lot of cringes and endless examples of callous cruelty. The ending pulled this one off the fence for me, and it was barely on that fence to start with.

Despite its unique premise, Eat Wheaties! is easy to embrace.

Possibly, Eat Wheaties! will age well, but at this point, there’s more cringe than comedy here. The character of Sid isn’t just endearingly awkward or amusingly fatuous, like Steve Carell’s Michael Scott in The Office. He’s just thickly insensitive.

The unappealingly named comedy Eat Wheaties! is a tedious exercise in patience that, like a bowl of soggy cereal, I would not recommend to anyone.

An unfortunate, unfunny mess.

Its content and execution are innocuous to the point of tedium, while the protagonist is no undervalued sweetie but the kind of grating personality that can clear a room.