Hounddog Reviews
Top Critic
The whole distasteful mess is sunk up to its neck in a brew of Southern Gothic atmosphere and hocus-pocus sentimentality.
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| Original Score: 0/4
Only Fanning's emotional honesty makes Hounddog watchable.
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| Original Score: 2/4
If there's a Southern-gothic cliché (oh, those snakes!) that writer-director Deborah Kampmeier misses, I don't know it.
| Original Score: .5/4
A slow procession of degradation and suffering, Hounddog is like a tall glass of bitter iced tea.
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| Original Score: 1/4
The latest wallow in regional cliche and stereotype.
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| Original Score: 1/4
The clichés are thick as the kudzu in 1956 Alabama.
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| Original Score: 1/4
Rarely has there been a movie as misguided as Hounddog, which self-righteously indulges in exploitation while loudly decrying it.
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| Original Score: 1/5
The problems that plague the movie land squarely with the writer, director and producer, Deborah Kampmeier, who has crafted a howler of a bad script, shows little affinity for working with actors and displays no visual sense behind the camera.
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| Original Score: 1/5
A bewildering slice of southern gothic hokum, it suffers from a weak script, proving that old saw about actors being only as good as the lines they're given.
Dakota Fanning takes an impressive step forward in her career, but that's about the only good thing about Hounddog.
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| Original Score: 2/4
This overripe tale of innocence lost has become one of notoriety found.
| Original Score: 2/5
Fanning is exceptional, anchoring the film with the confidence of an actress thrice her age.
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| Original Score: 2.5/4
Take away the 'hound' part of the title and you have an appropriate descriptor of this production.
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| Original Score: 1.5/4
Under the circumstances, Fanning is remarkably collected and even dignified. As for the rest of the gang, they ought to be returned to sender.
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| Original Score: F
[Dakota Fanning's] willingness to please appears to have been grossly exploited by writer-director Deborah Kampmeier.
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| Original Score: 1/6
Ms. Fanning's performance alone makes Hounddog worth seeing in this age of child Duses.
The symbolism [is] clobbering.
Wright Penn evidently helped get the film financed, but her big scenes feel shoehorned in. This is Dakota Fanning's film.
Fanning projects a strange mix of innocence and awareness. The triumph of her performance is her ability to turn it on and off in the same scene, sometimes even in the same shot.
Seriously, I'm astonished that anybody would try to pass this movie off as artistically or socially meaningful in 2007.
Hounddog is an indigestible gumbo of Southern Gothic ingredients seasoned with snake oil, biblical hash and thoroughly unpalatable spice.
