Average Rating: 5.2/10
Reviews Counted: 40
Fresh: 20 | Rotten: 20
No consensus yet.
Average Rating: 5.1/10
Critic Reviews: 9
Fresh: 4 | Rotten: 5
No consensus yet.
liked it
Average Rating: 3.4/5
User Ratings: 6,544
Three years after his "experimental" phase wrapped with the jarring, iconoclastic Container, Swedish enfant terrible Lukas Moodysson returned for this sprawling, ambitious social drama. Echoing Alejandro González Iñárritu's Babel and featuring two Hollywood A-listers as his leads, Mammoth also marked the director's premier English-language project. Michelle Williams and Gael García Bernal co-star as Ellen and Leo, New York marrieds; she's an emergency-room surgeon, he's a listless, vaguely
Nov 20, 2009 Wide
Apr 20, 2010
IFC Films
All Critics (40) | Top Critics (9) | Fresh (20) | Rotten (20)
Too many films exploit the perils faced by children when the social contract is ruptured, but Mammoth earns its cruel, sensationalistic turns and then some.
The overlapping stories, the emotional disconnect, the heavy-handed symbolism -- no, it's not a movie from the makers of Babel, its a mumbling, stammering copycat drama from Swedish director Lukas Moodysson.
In Mammoth, when a rich child eats her lunch in New York, a poor boy in the Philippines cries. And so it goes, as privilege begets exploitation with grimly deterministic logic and pages and pages of bad dialogue.
Mammoth manages to be as affecting as it is heartfelt.
Any semblance of subtlety was unfortunately lost in translation.
The movie is at once intimate and (in its softhearted way) preachy.
Having spent a decade purposefully alienating audiences, Swedish writer/director Lukas Moodysson claws his way back into the mainstream with this condescending, glossy slice of We Are The World-style film-making.
This is the Mike Leigh paradis terrestre, as good as it gets.
Mammoth looks sleek and is well-acted but the preachy tone is hard to bear.
[A] Babel-ish drama about the malaises wrought by globalisation, how we're closer than ever, and yet, if I'm not mistaken, farther apart. Unfortunately, you've seen it already.
There's nothing intrinsically wrong with message movies like this provided the characters feel real (they don't) and it's handled with a light touch (it isn't).
Mammoth is a masterclass in feel-bad cinema.
[A] fatuous, self-serving and fantastically dishonest exercise in pseudo-compassion, composed in the supercilious "globalised" style of Alejandro González Iñarritu's 2006 film Babel.
As woolly and elephantine as its title.
Mammoth is well-meaning, but ultimately contrived and melodramatic.
Lukas Moodysson's approach to filmmaking was becoming increasingly experimental, so it is a surprise to see how conventional Mammoth is.
This is an impressively directed, superbly acted and emotionally engaging drama, though the script is occasionally a little heavy-handed and the whole thing is nearly scuppered by a jaw-droppingly crass final line.
Moodysson braids these threads with contrived symmetries. The preaching soon grows wearisome.
A return to form by Moodysson although the bigger Iñárritu-like stuff -- globalisation, poverty, fraying family relationships -- are all a bit too neat to really engage.
An interesting idea, but Mammoth's good intentions -- like its characters' -- are lost somewhere in the delivery.
An inexorable dread holds the attention (if you've seen Moodysson's disturbing Lily-4-Ever you'll know what to expect) and as tragedy moves ever closer it's difficult too look away.
Mammoth features sensational moments of reaction and deliberation communicated by a gifted cast, building a few symbolic global bridges, more appreciable for their design than their destination.
Fragmented, but coherent, Mammoth comparatively narrates domestic drama in different social-cultural settings. Heaving with stereotypes, Mammoth concluded in accomplishment of imparting a definite set of emotions with the audiences.
September 16, 2011Super Reviewer
'Where do all the children play?' Disregard the film synopsis. These interwined stories, from varying cultural standpoints, confront and question post-modern values. The pursuit of money to better our lives and childrens' exacts a high price. Each character determines if the cost is worth it. This film's direction,
December 19, 2009Super Reviewer
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