Ella McCay

The movie is a hot mess that starts out slow with no truly likeable characters accept for her driver. Ella is so self-righteous its annoying. The rest of the cast where pretty much unnecessary. The ending while predictable was better the the first half of the movie. If you want to see wait until its on a streaming service.

Bright spot Albert Brooks, otherwise I disliked this and the rest of the cast as much as one possibly could in the short time I spent with it. It's like everyone here owed someone money or their soul. Saw this because Brooks. Both James L. And Albert, left irritated and irrationally angry. I thought this fluff was supposed to make you feel good? Hard 3.5 for competency and Brooks. If you must... than you must wait for streaming and hopefully a truly free streamer. Like YouTube or Tubi.

Ella McCay boasts a great cast, but unfortunately they are cobbled together with a muddled script and directionless story to create a rather lacklustre movie.

Tonally, the film is a mess. Is it a comedy? A drama? A satire? Who knows. Certainly not the cast or crew, as it was just all over the place in this respect. The performances didn't make any sense in the context of the story, almost feeling like caricatures of what they were trying to do.

In terms of the story and script, I really don't know what point it was trying to make. It circled around a few points and made them very poorly, but there were just too many story threads to give anything much focus. Characters and plot threads came and went in the blink of an eye, and there was no unifying theme or plot line or direction to it all.

It was also highly frustrating that practically every character in this film was highly annoying. I just simply did not care about any of them and struggled to get invested in any way to them.

I just really don't know what they were thinking with this film. A bizarre mess.

A somewhat rear vision mirror look at mostly conservative smallish town US politics with rather caricaturish goodies and baddies and not enough blur between the two to be convincing. Visually appealing, good pace that didn't outlast its welcome despite cliched themes and a reasonably clean if not totally believable wrap up. Jamie Lee Curtis made the most of limited opportunities and Emma Mackey ranged from fair to pretty good in some scenes. I can think of far worse ways to spend two hours.

I remember seeing the trailers for this film and I felt truly intrigued as it looked decent. But this movie is just straight up bad unfortunately I just couldn't find this movie anything else other than boring to be put it nicely. I appreciate a film for wanting to take a swing at something new and James L Brooks has made some absolutely great films and I appreciate his creative risk here but this movie just doesn't work at all. The story here is really convoluted and confusing to put it nicely and there's so many different plots that we just fly through without spending time or even expanding on them just to make this run time even longer than what it should've been. This movie feels like it takes absolutely forever to get somewhere and the film truly doesn't do a whole lot with its story and plots. The writing is also pretty bad and it's laughable at how dumb the characters are in this film especially our lead Ella McCay and it feels like the movie is intentionally making her really dumb and stupid for no reason. This movie just doesn't really have a whole lot going on for it and none of the performances really stood out at all to me and with such a stacked cast it's disappointing to say that I felt like nobody knew what they were doing with the characters they had in this film. The movie also attempts to make lots of comedic jokes which don't land for the majority of the film and end up leaving the audience in just cringe in a sense and there's some jokes which do land but it's very rare for this film. I also didn't even realize Hans Zimmer did the score for this film and that is blowing my mind because I felt like there's barley any music used in this film and when it was used it's solid but I just didn't expect it to be from Hans Zimmer. The cinematography is also decent and there's some decent shots throughout the movie but there's just not a whole lot going here overall and I personally would recommend to skip this movie.