Finding Amanda.

"Clumsily mashing up Leaving Las Vegas and Hardcore, Finding Amanda follows TV show writer and alcoholic compulsive gambler Taylor (Matthew Broderick) as he travels to Sin City to track down his whoring niece Amanda (Brittany Snow)," writes Nick Schager in Slant. The film's "inability to find a consistent groove that might best utilize its appealing leads... is secondary to its overarching unimaginativeness."

And in the other corner, Ella Taylor in the Voice: "By keeping the tone light, the players human (Steve Coogan has a nice turn as a greasy casino host), and never, ever romanticizing the addict, Finding Amanda comes by its heartbreak honestly."

Updated through 6/29.

"Over the years, it's been both disconcerting and somehow satisfying to watch Matthew Broderick gradually morph from a lithe, cocky teen heartthrob to a pudgy, middle-aged sad sack," writes Michael Koresky at indieWIRE. The transformation "began somewhere around Alexander Payne's superlative Election." Here, "Broderick puts on his best deluded-dork outfit and wanders precariously close to Chevy Chase territory." As for the film overall, "It's a litany of male fantasies and nightmares, posturing as a moralizing tract on values and the relativity of exploitation that even Broderick's dopey affability can't recoup."

Scott Tobias talks with Broderick for the AV Club.

"The more animated Mr Broderick becomes trying to fill Taylor's shoes, the less believable he is," argues S James Snyder in the New York Sun. "It probably doesn't help that Brittany Snow, as Taylor's titular niece, delivers one of the year's most vulnerable performances. The profoundly conflicted prostitute alternates between warm smiles and harsh tears, seeing prostitution as at once enabling and degrading. Once we find Amanda, the movie becomes a convincing study of a character at a crossroads. Taylor, though, comes across as more whiny than worldly."

"Blackly superficial, Amanda is pitched somewhere between a dark night of the soul and the pilot for one of those self-consciously edgy pay-cable shows that glory in the freedom of being able to show boobs, drugs, profanity and wanton bad behavior," writes Nathan Rabin at the AV Club. "Broderick has an affecting speech late in the film once he rouses himself from his downward spiral and experiences a moment of clarity, but Finding Amanda mostly seems content to skate briskly along the surface, seldom mining Broderick and Snow's predicaments for anything more than snarky gags and bitter one-liners. It's amusing but facile, reasonably clever but hopelessly glib."

"Finding Amanda is an easy movie to reject because its microcosm of a society obsessed with commercial sex and fast money is so relentlessly, uncomfortably and casually dark," writes Stephen Holden in the New York Times. "The only comparably cynical recent film set in Las Vegas was Peter Berg's savage 1998 comedy, Very Bad Things, in which a bachelor party takes a tragic turn. That film wasn't as funny as Finding Amanda, because the dialogue, sharp as it was, lacked the absurdist razor edge of this curdled screwball comedy. Here the characters' outlandish utterances (especially Amanda's) will make you gasp."

"The Hollywood hack, full of vice, self-loathing and needing redemption, finds that an actual prostitute has more pride in herself and her work than he does," writes Mark Olsen in the Los Angeles Times. "Written with more bite, the premise might hold up, but as executed here by [Peter] Tolan, it is a soft-hearted, haphazard mess."

Michael Ordoña profiles Peter Facinelli for the Los Angeles Times.

Update, 6/29: Choire Sicha talks with Broderick for the Los Angeles Times.

Posted by dwhudson at June 27, 2008 2:45 PM