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American film critics have savaged Russell Crowe's new romantic comedy A Good Year, with one describing it "as stale as a week-old baguette". Another critic said Crowe's attempt at slapstick comedy was "like watching a Brahma bull trying to tap-dance".
If Crowe was hoping A Good Year - now screening in New Zealand - would earn him his fourth Oscar nomination, he had better hope the 6000 members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences don't take much notice of what the critics are saying.
"Audiences will be checking their watches during this joyless attempt at comedy," USA Today critic Claudia Puig said. "Crowe tries to be adorable and wacky, but is mostly charmless and irksome as a high-powered investment banker."
A Good Year is set in the beautiful French wine-making region of Provence and re-teams Crowe with Gladiator director Ridley Scott.
Crowe plays an arrogant London investment banker who mellows when he returns to his uncle's chateau in Provence where he spent summers as a boy. "Let's just say that both Grants (Hugh and the ghost of Cary) can rest comfortably," New York Times critic Stephen Holden said. "Mr Crowe is not unlikable. But as for visceral charm, there are only flashes here and there."
Crowe has been on his best behaviour in the United States over the past few weeks while promoting A Good Year. He shared a glass of wine on Conan O'Brien's late night TV talkshow and he stuffed a turkey with Martha Stewart on her TV cooking show.
Crowe was in need of a public image makeover in the US following his arrest last year for throwing a phone at a concierge in a New York hotel. What better way to get in the public's good books than to play Max Skinner, a bad boy turned good boy, in A Good Year?
Peter Hartlaub, in a review for the San Francisco Chronicle, did not buy it.
"This role would seem like a good opportunity to soften the actor's image," he said, "but Crowe's offscreen antics have made it nearly impossible to pull off the Hugh Grant-Bill Murray lovable workaholic.
"No matter how hard he tries to change his ways you still expect Max to chuck a telephone at the hired help."
There were a few critics who enjoyed Crowe's performance. "He's genuinely funny and often exudes a kind of charm we don't often see from him - especially in his more recent, far more intense, work," said Bill Zwecker, of the Chicago Sun-Times.
Other reviewers said:
"Though A Good Year is set in French wine country, it's best described as small beer."
"It is a misfire on so many levels - script, casting, direction."
"Crowe is woefully miscast in a role that should have gone to an actor versed in romantic comedy. Colin Firth would have been a wiser choice."
"Unbearably sweet and emotionally lifeless".
"Even Hugh Grant isn't doing the Hugh Grant shtick anymore, which makes Crowe's dutiful stomping around on the way to sensual enlightenment all the more miscued."
But although Crowe will be unhappy with the critics he has other things to be happy about - he says he wants to have another child.
"I have two beautiful children and I hope to have a third one, but probably will not bring that up with the wife just yet."
He says his wife, Danielle Spencer, may want a break before another pregnancy, following the birth of their youngest child, Tennyson Spencer Crowe, in July.
- AAP
