Rick1000

This looks like something a bunch of friends might film for gags in the backyard around the pool. The problem is that hitting people in the head with a shovel isn't really that funny even if you are that stoned. An interesting idea, this flakey film goes no place and wastes some talented people like Anne Kendrick. I'm wondering if she lost a bet and had to make this movie or if someone she knew was being held hostage.

This movie starts out with a lot of promise, but there are far too many loose ends and inexplicable stories (and videos) that have no real connection to anything. The writers clearly included stories for shock / shlock value which adds to the totally meaningless results. Other than an attractive female lead, there's nothing worth watching here because the characters are as empty as the theaters were when this was released - or escaped. Whoever made this movie has a huge problem with telling a cohesive story and creating real characters rather than genre based caricatures of what he's seen before. Bad movie. caricatures

I don't often agree with movie critics but they nailed it on this one. Just watched it on TV - great premise, very promising. BUT, in their haste to create a whodoneit with plenty of twists and turns, the writers and directors forgot to create characters that had any depth. We don't know very much about any of them, and what we learn comes out in a mess of scattered flashbacks. The dialogue is stilted for the five guys involved and the wives are indistinguishable. I kept watching because I was curious, but it's not an engaging film. Somewhere between letting us know it's a murder mystery in the beginning and how the pieces fall together in the end, we don't get a very cohesive movie.

[SPOILER ALERT: This review contains spoilers.]

From the hype and marketing I thought Hail, Caesar would be a very funny movie... I was wrong. This is an ambitious effort with a bunch of movie genres from the 1940s and '50s packed in, some with humorous results and others for the sake of it. The problem with this film is that while there are several funny moments scattered throughout, the Coen Brothers introduce various plotlines, none of which generate any steam. Nothing has us asking; "what will happen?" How will this work out? The stories are so meekly resolved that nobody cares. Add to that the fact that no characters are explored fully enough to love them, hate them or really careabout then, and you've got a movie in which the audience simply doesn't have any reason to watch other than having paid to be there.