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The Daily Tar Heel
Diversions

Movie Review: My One and Only

Never before have I wanted to walk out of the theater five minutes into a movie. Never before have I finished a movie and genuinely thought about how much better my life would have been had I spent the last two hours licking envelopes. Never before have I considered giving a movie zero stars.

But here I am, and now I face the difficult task of explaining to you just how bad “My One and Only” is. At first I thought that maybe I should do the Mr.-Pretentious-Pants, big-shot critic thing, and try to be very nuanced in my dissection. To take a jackhammer to its adamantine shell of s--ttiness, so to speak, and try and dig something redeeming out of the rubble.

But I can’t do it. Obviously somebody somewhere can, seeing as it has an 80 percent “fresh” rating among top (i.e., professional) critics on Rotten Tomatoes. But I’m not one of those people, and I cannot at all imagine what is running through their heads. Have they lost it?

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They must have, because this movie is transparently bad. Even if you take it as a light, “diverting” road trip movie, about a woman (Renee Zellweger) who leaves her cheating husband (Kevin Bacon) and takes her two kids on a whirlwind tour of Eisenhower’s America, for what it’s worth, you can’t blink away the half-hearted performances by every major actor. Or the laughable script that wants to be clever in direct proportion to how badly it fails. Or the rushed pacing that has absolutely no sense of the time-space continuum as it exists on Earth.

Even the cinematography underwhelms, lacking clarity and focus in a way that I seriously doubt is intentional.

I’m really just lost for words, tongue-tied, over how bad this movie is. Just about the only coherent thought I can formulate is my sense of regret over the two hours I wasted sitting through it .
 

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