Marley & Me Reviews
Top Critic
Evidently contrived and something of an ungainly hybrid, the film shares its canine protagonist's facility for wearing down your resistance.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/6
The dog -- or the many dogs who play Marley through the years -- also delivers some of the funniest scenes.
I think this movie works because of the relationship on screen between Owen Wilson and Jennifer Aniston.
Not every book has a movie lurking in it.
Frankel turns the camera toward the canines as frequently as possible, but too often we're stuck with Wilson and Aniston's bland characters. You wonder if it might have been better to let sleeping dogs lie.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/4
The movie is ultimately less about the pain of loss than about the way families often take shape around a pet.
David Frankel adapts John Grogan's sentimental bestseller with no artistic pretensions beyond alternately making you feel like your heart is caving in, then injecting you with a gigantic syringe of good cheer.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
It's a film guaranteed to appeal to tender-hearted pet lovers. But the movie, which was largely filmed in Miami and Fort Lauderdale, turns out to be less about dogs than it is about one man's trajectory through adulthood.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
When the story lags -- and it does more than a few times -- there is Alan Arkin as Grogan's crusty editor Arnie Klein to help things along.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/5
The production manages, against heavy odds, to make its canine star an incorrigible bore. The problem is bad parenting.
Marley & Me turns out to be the best -- and truest -- film about humans and our animals to arrive onscreen in a dog's age.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/4
Marley, of course, steals every scene he's in, which is most of them.
Full Review
| Original Score: B+
Doesn't consistently capture the book's personable tone.
Director David Frankel gives the movie the aw-shucks feeling of a sitcom with a large sentimental streak.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/4
At the end of Marley & Me you don't leave the theater with a sense that anything much has been learned, only that a fixture in the Grogans' comfortable suburban lives has been removed.
| Original Score: 2/5
Marley's misadventures play like a TV movie, never reaching the heights of such endearing canine-centered films as 2000's My Dog Skip.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/4
You should bring lots of Kleenex with you. It might just come in handy.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
Want to see a grown man cry? Take him to Marley & Me.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
I thought the first three-quarters of it about as engrossing as a Puppy Chow commercial, and the last quarter pretty depressing. But that's chiefly because it only made me think of my own dogs.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/4
I said to Lady, "It's a labra-bore"/She said, "Scout, you overpraise."
Full Review
| Original Score: 1.5/4
If characters talking to dogs and dog reaction shots are some of your favorite things, add some stars to this review.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/5
A dog movie that isn't a dog of a movie -- what a pleasant Christmas surprise.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
A disarmingly enjoyable, wholehearted comic vision of the happy messiness of family life.
Full Review
| Original Score: A-
Marley & Me is everything you could want in a holiday movie -- family friendly, touching, funny. Plus, it's surprisingly intelligent and real. It may be the best family film of the year.
Full Review
| Original Score: A-
When Marley is not on the screen, Wilson and Aniston demonstrate why they are gifted comic actors. They have a relationship that's not too sitcomish, not too sentimental, mostly smart and realistic.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
The movie never captures the crucial leap that made the book a hit. It's never Marley & Us.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/4
Need a shortcut to manipulate an audience's emotions? Always go with the dog.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/5
The book, like the movie it inspired, is a sweet, surprisingly moving chronicle of a young couple's struggle to simultaneously build a family, advance their careers and maintain their sanity.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
Marley & Me proves how lifeless Lady and the Tramp would have been if told from the p.o.v. of Jim Dear and Darling.
The book has been known to make grown men weep. But seeing the movie, you can't help but feel had.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/5
The nonthreatening adorableness of Jennifer Aniston and Owen Wilson is no match for the emotional range of Marley.
Here, there's no great momentum, just a long, flat arc toward the inevitable.
Seldom does a studio release feature so little drama -- and not much comedy either, other than when the dog clowns around.
Watching the stars try to out-cutesy the mutt is one for the puke bucket.
Full Review
| Original Score: 1.5/4
This perky, episodic film is as broad and obvious as it could be, but delivers on its own terms thanks to sparky chemistry between its sunny blond stars, Owen Wilson and Jennifer Aniston, and the unabashed emotion-milking of the final reel.
Marley & Me strikes a surprisingly delicate balance between wacky humor and a more heartfelt look at how a dog, even a badly behaved one, becomes part of the family.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/6
