Avis Metacritic

A film of surface pleasures, even joys, but those joys seem to be longing for a central idea around which to coalesce.

Swan is more of a doodle than a fully formed idea, though not necessarily less enjoyable for it, since it was clearly intended to be an undisciplined, anything-goes kinda story.

Fellini used to get away with such slender crises, but he had Marcello Mastrioanni behind the shades, as well as a more vivid penchant for psychosexual fantasy. Coppola and Swan are stuck in their obsessions with dorky album art and old-man cocktails at Musso & Frank. A precious, arid thing, Glimpse arrives pinned to Styrofoam like a prize arthropod.

With neither the moral bite of satire nor a voluptuary surrender that really basks in shallowness, this is a vague, unsatisfying work.

All this eye candy is ultimately only about as engaging as watching kids at play, which is what Sheen and Schwartzman seem to be doing. I can’t argue that this isn’t an accurate glimpse inside some man’s mind — perhaps Austin Powers?

With such an in-house cast of extended Coppola family sparklers, one would think things couldn’t go too wrong in the comedy department, but they have little chance to oil the wheels of a creaky script written around Sheen.

The film speeds ahead with almost gleeful disinterest in dealing with the narrative challenges it sets up before resolving them in the most perfunctory ways imaginable.

Seriously, this is one of the strangest and most painful films in recent memory.

Swan is so eager to be a trippy comic lark that it ends up resembling a clown trying to fit through a pea-shooter.

It isn’t a movie so much as a feature-length perfume commercial for a Charlie Sheen signature cologne with gorgeous packaging and absolutely nothing inside.