Metacritic reviews

The casting is a real coup, with Barr going her everywoman TV persona one better by breaking the big screen heroine mold, and Streep blowing away any notion that she can’t be funny.

Barr could have made an easy, predictable and dumb comedy at any point in the last couple of years. Instead, she took her chances with an ambitious project - a real movie. It pays off, in that Barr demonstrates that there is a core of reality inside her TV persona, a core of identifiable human feelings like jealousy and pride, and they provide a sound foundation for her comic acting.

As feminist polemic, She-Devil is dubious indeed.

Miss Streep dives into this thimble-sized comedy and makes one believe - at least, while she is on the screen - that it is an Olympic-sized swimming pool of wit.

Director Susan Seidelman takes aim at the box office with the team of movie queen Meryl Streep and TV slob queen Roseanne Barr. She misfires. Streep gets all the jokes, and Barr, looking stranded, plays it straight. Worse, nobody’s bothered to write them a big scene together. But for a while you can see the possibilities.

An all-star lineup with some kookie moments, but a bit limp overall.

Streep's tentative foray into comedy is deliberately mannered, but the breathy delivery and constant fluttering of hands are nevertheless excessive. And in her film debut, Barr just isn't imposing enough to inspire notions of devilish vengeance. The film-makers have opted for frothy satire, but as comedies go this is lamentably short on laughs.

Seidelman, Strugatz and Burns are so busy systematically constructing Barr's revenge and keeping her smugly vindicated, they fail to realize they've bulldozed all comical landmarks in sight. So it ultimately doesn't matter whether or not Streep is redeemed, Barr is vindicated, Begley is punished -- or whether or not they all go to hell in a handbasket. They're all buried under the rubble.

The movie's message is murky and out of whack. Seidelman's style of comedy trashes everyone. The movie's jokes, which cover everything from dead rodents to geriatric incontinence, are cartoony and sour and misanthropic. And the flukiest thing is that they're misogynic too. It's hard to imagine that a man could have been as ruthlessly coldblooded as Seidelman has been about Ruth's unattractiveness. The network of women workers that Ruth establishes to help her nail her husband runs on pettiness and rancor -- it's a coalition of resentment. In "She-Devil," Seidelman divides the world of women between the envied and the envious. She has a message for the Ruths of the world, and it's not a pretty one. She tells them that the best they can hope for is payback.

Seidelman has succeeded in making a sow's ear out of a silk purse. Weldon's novel is witty, wacky, and wonderfully way out; the film is none of those things. The problem lies with Barr in the pivotal role of Ruth. Once the part was hers, the whole script had to be rewritten around her monotonous delivery and limited acting ability, much to the detriment of the plot.