Critic Reviews

The film goes down easy because it saves the self-improvement clichés for the homestretch.

Despite a tone that oscillates between quirkish and mawkish, it’s yet another warmed-over male midlife crisis movie, given supposedly higher stakes because the middle of life will be as far as this male will get.

Zoey Deutch is fine in a non-demanding role as the requisite starry-eyed female student, and Danny Huston (“Wonder Woman”) gives us a softer side as Richard’s weepy best friend. But this is, at its core, a one-man show, and given the uncertain future of Depp’s career (being axed from the “Pirates of the Caribbean” franchise, for example), it might also have been titled “Johnny Says Goodbye.”

There’s nothing wrong with a little cheese in a message about life, it’s just that with The Professor there's nothing more to it.

To work, The Professor demands that the viewer believe in Richard and, from about the 15-minute point, I didn’t.

The movie, which comes off strangely wide-eyed about such “outré” things as marijuana and same-sex attraction, evokes some 1970s-era George Segal vehicle as it struggles to pair hip defiance with come-to-Jesus-style pathos, the latter of which provides a few of the film’s more compelling moments.

The picture fares better at finding occasional moments of warmth than at convincing us of its characters' reality.

It flirts with being offensive, but falls short. It’s not entirely maudlin, not wholly misogynistic, but close enough.

It’s never a good thing when a film about a dying man sometimes has us wondering if some of the people in his life will be better off without him.

From its rigid, symmetry-inclined compositions to its heavily worked one-liners, this is cautious, stifling filmmaking in thrall to a reckless, retrograde man, who does little in the course of 90 minutes to merit great fascination or pathos.