Metacritic reviews

The Distinguished Gentleman is an easy, breezy romp of a movie, a low comedy of highly entertaining order.

Murphy's comic brilliance is at the service of the story and he positively shines with a number of diverse and zany impersonations, most enjoyably a Jesse Jackson takeoff.

The Distinguished Gentleman prefers to give us measured laughs at a leisurely pace, and then it settles for the sellout upbeat ending. Ho hum.

Eddie Murphy does his patented routines effectively, and the dialogue has some pungent moments, but the movie doesn't succeed as the "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington" update it would like to be.

All The Distinguished Gentleman has is Eddie Murphy doing his best to be the life of the party. By the end of the movie you wish he would just go to another party.

There's just not enough good material, however, to sustain the comic pace.

Uneven but occasionally quite funny political satire.

The filmmakers treat all the characters, not to mention the audience, as sitcom puppets.

Murphy occasionally does uninterrupted seconds of shtick, but the film is stuffed with cheap sentiment (a kid with cancer), extraneous characters and embarrassing simplistic politics.

Unfortunately, the film rests heavily on the shoulders of Murphy, who seems to wander aimlessly from scene to scene, searching for a laugh. The joke's on him, though: There are none.