Critic Reviews
35
Metascore
Generally Unfavorable
positive
0(0%)
mixed
8(73%)
negative
3(27%)
Showing 11 Critic Reviews
60
The cast is uniformly appealing in out-of-left-field ways, but writer-director Brooks Branch lets the story amble lazily, which -- like Gabriel and almost every character like him you've ever seen -- gets a little tiring.
50
Channing doesn't bring any new tricks to the table but with her character's tenacious and spirited nature she's fun to have around for a few brief scenes.
50
Timothy Hutton is a good actor. So whom to blame for Multiple Sarcasms?
42
Branch also adds some welcome visual pizzazz when needed, and admirably tries to keep the movie from becoming the story of a heroic creative adventurer and the people who try to drag him down. The characters in Multiple Sarcasms are more nuanced, and don’t reduce to a generic good or bad.
40
Timothy Hutton's fine, loose-limbed perf as a man adrift lifts Multiple Sarcasms, frosh scribe-helmer Brooks Branch's male menopause apologia, out of cliche-ridden territory -- at least temporarily.
40
Cowriter Branch isn’t much of a dramatist either, as this hoary midlife-crisis tale is watchable solely for its reliable cast.
40
Rather than some deeper understanding of the human condition, what we get from Multiple Sarcasms is a lot of heavy breathing.
40
Woody Allen proved long ago that the self-pitying introvert is a fit subject for a movie, but only if the film has a strong enough sense of humor to make us laugh at ourselves. But Brooks Branch, who directed Multiple Sarcasms and wrote the screenplay with Linda Morris, was either too lazy to come up with the absurdist aphorisms that might give Multiple Sarcasms a lift, or he labored under the delusion that Gabriel’s metaphysical malaise is such a fresh idea that it deserves microscopic inspection.
38
Multiple Sarcasms happens to be the title of the play within the movie, and it turns out to be by far the most interesting thing in the film. Not that many people will want to suffer through the first 90 minutes of this vanity production to get there.
30
A numbingly indulgent drama whose fine cast can't breathe life into a script that isn't nearly as self-aware as it thinks.
