Meet Bill (2007)
Average Rating: 3.8/10
Reviews Counted: 19
Fresh: 4 | Rotten: 15
No consensus yet.
Average Rating: 2.7/10
Critic Reviews: 7
Fresh: 0 | Rotten: 7
No consensus yet.
liked it
Average Rating: 3.1/5
User Ratings: 7,848
My Rating
Movie Info
A henpecked husband locked in a dead-end job attempts to reclaim his life with a little help from a self-assured teen and a pretty lingerie sales girl in this bittersweet romantic comedy starring Aaron Eckhart, Elizabeth Banks, and Jessica Alba. Bill (Eckhart) is a walking doormat; his in-laws look down their noses at him, his wife, Jess (Banks), neglects him, and his love for chocolate is beginning to affect his waistline. When Bill discovers that Jess has recently struck up a "friendship" with
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Cast
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Aaron Eckhart
Bill -
Jessica Alba
Lucy -
Elizabeth Banks
Jess -
Logan Lerman
The Kid -
Timothy Olyphant
Chip -
Marisa Coughlan
Laura -
Kristen Wiig
Jane
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Meet Bill Trailer & Photos
All Critics (21) | Top Critics (8) | Fresh (4) | Rotten (16) | DVD (5)
The story of a man (Aaron Eckhart) grappling with middle-age ennui at work and at home feels done to death, as does the distracting addition of a spunky rich-kid high schooler.
Top CriticThis movie never should have seen the light of day.
Male midlife crisis presents as pathological self-loathing in Meet Bill, an imperative to which the only sane response is: No thanks.
Even a hilarious turn by Kristen Wiig as the owner of a doughnut company can't save this clichéd, meandering story from playing like American Beauty lite.
Meet Bill misfires on multiple levels, but its foremost mistake is focusing on a sad-sack underachiever. Bill doesn't believe in himself, so why should we?
When all is said and done, Bill is let down by Bill.
Discovering your real self is the theme of Meet Bill, in which Bill has to work hard to finally meet himself
Not even a solid performance can keep the script's problems at bay.
It doesn't take long for Bill to suddenly veer off course into total impenetrability, where the characters become a blur, the hacky visual poetry is rolled out, and the plot drops dead.
Not awful or offensive, but pretty weak broth nonetheless.
It tries hard to mimic the arch tone of the best suburban tragicomedies (American Beauty, et al.), but a surfeit of stock characters, double-wide plot holes and heavy-handed symbolism ruins the effect.
As the movie goes on, you actually end up rooting for this schmuck to take charge of his life, and in a way, the movie is sort of inspiring.
For those whose idea of hilarity is an adult and a kid throwing fireworks at each other, then getting stoned and playing piggyback in the mall, this movie should be a refreshing tonic.
Takes scattershot aim at all manner of appropriate targets-the vapid nature of local television news, the perceived stigma of standing out from the pack in America, the dilemma of dreams deferred and abandoned-but rarely hits the comic bull's-eye.
Clunky and smug, Meet Bill isn't convincing for one moment.
Audience Reviews for Meet Bill
Super Reviewer
Super Reviewer
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- Bill: They hate that I'm working at their bank. I hate that I'm working at their bank.
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Meet Bill is a perfect example that an exemplary cast can't hold up a movie that is without good material. The cast is great: Aaron Eckart, Elizabeth Banks, Timothy Olyphant, Holmes Osborne, Kristen Wiig, Jessica Alba, and Logan Lerman. The story, however, is extremely dull.
The story is about Bill. A man who's addicted to sugar, works at a bank with his in-laws, and has a wife that cheats on him with the local news guy. Bill then takes up mentoring a student and starts to try to find himself. His search is pretty boring. The movie wants to be insightful and funny, but it just comes off as a dull and unfunny comedy with no redeeming qualities; that will be forgotten twenty minutes after watching it.
I honestly thought I would like this. I'm an Aaron Eckart fan. I've loved several of his movies. From Thank You For Smoking to The Dark Knight. From Conversations with Other Women(Extremely Underrated) to Rabbit Hole. He normally plays characters that are interesting. Here he plays a character that is extremely, ummm.... uninteresting and extremely boring.
Meet Bill is not funny enough to be a good comedy and not dramatic enough to be a good drama. It's just a piece of garbage. Once you throw it away, you forget about it.