IMDb user comments for
The Great Buck Howard (2008)

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17 out of 23 people found the following comment useful :-
Fairly Boring Movie, 22 January 2008

Author: thebubblewrapguy from United States

I really don't want to criticize this movie too much. So many people involved in this movie are people that I genuinely like. And I think that's true for nearly all of us; we like great talents like John Malkovich, Emily Blunt, Steve Zahn and Tom Hanks. Good people who have given us great work.

In this case, the real problem is that this is a boring story. I sat through the entire film with my wife and a packed house, and there was much squirming all around. There was something very amateurish about the movie, as far as the direction and writing, and it was terribly predictable. My wife said, "Why would they make this movie? It was so boring!" I wanted to disagree, because I'd give it a three while she gives it a q, but the truth is that this was like watching a bunch of people you like not have a good time.

Malkovich does his best to make his character more interesting than written, as does Emily Blunt who has the misfortune of being thrown in randomly and forced to do things just for the sake of story. Steve Zahn, who is always good, struggles to make his dull material interesting. In the end, they were all fighting against the same problem. This is a simple story with no conflict or tension or drama or comedy that telegraphs itself every step of the way. The characters are underwritten and uninteresting, and we're left with talented actors doing their best with weak material.

I would not recommend seeing this movie, even for free. It's not worth the time you need to invest. And I really wish that I didn't have to say that, because I really wanted to like this movie.

6 out of 15 people found the following comment useful :-
Pretty boring and unnecessary, 28 January 2008

Author: silly_elliott from Birmingham, England

Sean McGinly's debut feature The Great Buck Howard is a curious, small-scale relationship comedy/drama about an over-the-hill entertainer and his young, direction-less-in-life assistant. Colin Hanks stars as the assistant, Troy, who signs up for the gig after impulsively bolting law school and the career track his dad, played by Hanks's real-life dad Tom, is pushing him towards. Malkovich goes the opposite way, energetically turning his "Buck Howard" into a show-biz cartoon, a caricature of an impossible-to-please has-been who travels with his show through the flyover states while the larger entertainment culture passes him by. One of the film's problems is its failure to come up with engaging ways to turn the relationship between Howard and Troy into anything resembling a real story. We expect him to get drawn into both Howard's life and the methodology of his effects, but he is never much more than a bemused observer of this show-biz "fossil" he's randomly hooked up with. I found it very disappointing that this movie was even showing at the Sundance film festival, it was so below the standards of the low budget indies and if you're going to use big stars you have to make it all the more genius a screenplay otherwise people are going to be cynical and bored... like I was.

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