Zack and Miri Make a Porno Reviews
Top Critic
All in all it's a modern-day, Kevin Smith fairytale: a big-screen bearing, perhaps, of his soul at its sincerest and wittiest, if not filthiest.
Full Review
| Original Score: B+
Smith may have pioneered this kind of upfront sex chat, but the Apatow team refined it. 'Zack and Miri' feels uncomfortably like a gruesome game of filth-talk oneupmanship, and it's hard to care who comes out on top.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/6
It's one thing for a movie to be dirty; it's another thing altogether for it to be plain sloppy.
Kevin Smith turns out to be reverent after all: he wants to separate true love from mere copulating for money, but his story mixes romance and porn so inextricably that he seems confused, and the movie trips over its own conceits.
Everyone on screen seems to be having so much fun.
Seth Rogen is totally out of control. He's been marvelously funny in the past, and will be again, but get that party animal back in his cage.
Zack and Miri isn't very funny. Laugh-out-loud bits here are as rare as real breasts in an adult film.
Full Review
| Original Score: 1.5/4
The audience where I watched the movie laughed so hard that we all probably missed a third of the lines, and it was still one of the funnier movies I've seen this year.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/4
The jokes are forced, almost mechanical, in their crudeness. They're so carefully placed that they feel a little precious rather than spontaneous, which ends up defying that impulsive, animal thing inside us.
The mood lurches around a bit, and the film itself feels a bit diluted -- as if Kevin Smith were doing Judd Apatow doing Kevin Smith. And Smith, and his fans, are far too original to settle for that for long.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/4
Without the wit, raunchiness tends to feel uncomfortably forced. And the moments when Z&M works are, almost without exception, the ones that are more sweet than shocking. All the rest, frankly, feel like Apatow Lite.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/5
Zack and Miri Make a Porno is crude and raunchy, but it's also a great date movie. See it with someone you love -- and want to grope.
| Original Score: 3/4
Despite all the waggish raunch-talk, it's just not especially funny. And despite all the agile intercourse (originally rated NC-17), it's frankly kind of a bore.
Full Review
| Original Score: 1.5/4
There may not be a special movie rating for this kind of coyness, but it definitely feels like emotional porn.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/4
There are laughs. Big, loud laughs. Laughs of self-recognition, laughs at social duplicity, laughs at prejudices of all types. Lots of laughs about the most basic of human functions. And many, many laughs at our own inhibitions.
Full Review
| Original Score: B+
While I wouldn't call the role of cheery, foul-mouthed Miri nuanced, Banks and Rogen click in a way that Rogen and Katherine Heigl in Knocked Up did not.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
Zack and Miri Make a Porno, in spite of its lewdness, follows a gee-whiz romantic-comedy formula that would not be out of place on the Disney Channel.
| Original Score: 3.5/4
Other peoples' emotional intimacy can be downright embarrassing. Here, sadly, it's also boring.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/4
The adult film reenactments are fairly gross and explicit and, worse, humorless.
Full Review
| Original Score: C-
It's a funny concept whose execution does not live up to its potential.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/4
At 38, the grand old man of raunch talk has figured out how to make a movie that's sweet, funny and (a little) sexy.
It's a pleasant story, but not particularly well-told.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/4
Rogen and Banks, both terrific, bring out the sweet and spicy best in each other.
| Original Score: 3/4
It's all vintage Smith -- if you can say that about a 38-year-old -- just pushed a little further.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/4
It's a slow-footed film that confirms that Smith may never be able to lift his game to that 40 Year Old Virgin level of heart and romance. He's just too juvenile to pull it off.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/5
There's a warm Boogie Nights-style vibe to the little family of oddballs Zack and Miri recruit to help them.
Will this movie offend you? Somehow Kevin Smith's very excesses defuse the material.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
If this film were about teenagers, it might seem less like an outrageous comedy and more like a mundane slice of life.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/4
Zack and Miri ends up as an interesting hybrid: a sweet, feel-good comedy that makes you feel like you need a shower after you've watched it.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/5
That combination of raunch and heart isn't impossible to achieve -- at his best, Apatow can pull it off -- but it requires a nimbler pen and a sweeter soul than Kevin Smith brings to this movie.
Of course, what Zack and Miri actually make -- and what Rogen and Banks power their way through with a cherubic energy above and beyond the call of duty for a premise so inconsequential and puerile -- is another Kevin Smith comedy.
Full Review
| Original Score: C-
Audiences know what to expect from Smith, and he does not disappoint.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
Rogen and Banks make an extremely likable comic pair, even though they're an unlikely romantic match (or perhaps because of it).
With Zack and Miri Make a Porno, Smith seems eager to retake the fast-talking-filth crown, and also get in on a little of Apatow's racket of throwing in some sentimentality.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/6
It's hard to imagine this film succeeding on any level without Mr. Rogen and Ms. Banks as the leads.
Nothing about Zack and Miri feels terribly fresh, much less transgressive.
It's written and directed by Kevin Smith -- and hats off to him for being savvy enough to go for a piece of the Apatow action! Too bad he doesn't rise to the occasion.
The funniest movie of Smith's I've seen since Clerks. It's When Harry Did Sally.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
The bluntly titled Zack and Miri Make a Porno is a cheerfully vulgar love story or a sweet-hearted sex farce, however you want to look at it.
At 38, Kevin Smith is still making foul-mouthed adolescent comedies, but a bit of adult sweetness and romance now creeps in.
