Raising Helen Reviews
Top Critic
[Garry Marshall] piles on the cornball touches with the sledgehammer effect of a bad sitcom director.
This ode to the most stifling aspects of family and motherhood make you feel like the hicks have all uprooted themselves and moved into the front office at Touchstone.
Almost nothing about Raising Helen rings very true, other than the camera's crush on Kate Hudson.
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| Original Score: 2/4
Even those who seek the undemanding entertainment of life troubles being bravely dealt with might end up wishing they were given more than just sitcom resolutions.
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| Original Score: 2/5
There's no real conflict, and the screenplay sometimes approaches idiocy.
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| Original Score: 1.5/4
Far from the worst cookie-cutter film to come off the Hollywood assembly line, merely the latest.
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| Original Score: 2/4
It's a painless, affably sentimental comedy that would make a popular TV series -- and probably will become one.
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| Original Score: 3/4
Like tumbling into chick-flick hell.
| Original Score: 1/4
[Marshall] evidently finds the film's premise to be outrageously funny. Some viewers -- especially those who have looked out a window in the last 20 years -- may understandably be less impressed.
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| Original Score: 2/5
Does its inoffensive comedy bit. It's all professional, predictable, by the numbers.
Can't decide whether it's a romance, a fish-out- of-water flick, a teen-parent conflict story, or a tale of sibling rivalry and reconciliation, and therefore fails at each.
| Original Score: 2/4
Rest assured, these crises will be resolved, and Helen will be enriched by the experiences. But going through them with her throws more sugar into your system than I can take.
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| Original Score: 2/4
This dry-duct soaper chugs along in the Hollywood netherworld where humor and pathos are in short supply.
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| Original Score: 2/5
[Hudson] melds her radiance to a budding maternal soulfulness.
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| Original Score: B
By no means a great movie, but it's efficiently watchable, thanks to Marshall's direction and occasionally buoyant thanks to its stars.
| Original Score: B-
Like one of Marshall's less-original sitcom pilots stretched way beyond feature length.
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| Original Score: 2/4
Marshall, who seems to specialize in affability, breaks no new ground and doesn't do much with the old soil he tills.
| Original Score: C
Constantly warm and sometimes devastatingly real, showing just how hard it can be for a family to replace the early departed.
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| Original Score: 3/4
Tame and timid from beginning to end, and relentlessly conventional.
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| Original Score: 2/4
Boils down every feel-good chick-flick cliche of the last 15 years into a lumpy mass of multiplex comfort food.
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| Original Score: 1.5/4
As relentlessly cute as you'd expect from a Garry Marshall picture.
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| Original Score: 2.5/4
Jumps back and forth between airy-fairy romantic comedy and leaden family drama with the alacrity of a manic-depressive.
You are likely to encounter more surprises on the way to the bathroom each morning than you do in this film.
Kate Hudson stars in this mildly ingratiating comedy as a selfish fashionista whose career stops short when she is granted custody of her late sister's three children.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/5
It confirms the suspicion that Mr. Marshall is more a commodity than a director.
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| Original Score: C+
As much as we want to wrap our hearts around this wannabe uplifting tearjerker, it's just too shallow to embrace.
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| Original Score: 3/5
There's an old-school innocence to Marshall's style, and it's satisfying to be whisked away from reality to this parallel universe where we find it possible to laugh amid such a fundamentally tragic scenario.
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| Original Score: 2.5/4
What Raising Helen doesn't offer is a competent (never mind compelling) performance from Hudson, who is as cute as lace pants and has approximately as much acting skill.
| Original Score: 2/4
A cunning and immensely likeable coming-of- parenting-age saga that repeatedly flies in the face of its own sitcom impulses.
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| Original Score: 3/4
The characters are clichéd, and their predicaments are familiar.
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| Original Score: 2.5/4
A winsomely formulaic domestic comedy that says that women can have it all -- but they really shouldn't try to.
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| Original Score: C+
You can take the director out of television, but sometimes you can't take television out of the director.
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| Original Score: 2/4
One of those bogus 'sincere' pictures -- a schmaltz-ridden mediocrity without an honest moment in it.
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| Original Score: D+
If [Helen] had her own NBC sitcom, she'd be safe for many a season of dating mishaps, workplace cock-ups, and conspicuously plush interior design; since she's stuck in a big-screen seriocomedy ... she must be swiftly rehabilitated of her egocentric ways.
At two hours, Raising Helen feels like it's never going to end, and, when the obligatory all-is-forgiven finale finally arrives, it's a welcome relief.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/4
Hudson generates enough good will in the first two-thirds of Raising Helen to offset sporadic preachiness.
Marshall keeps the performances within a narrow range that might be called over-the-top lite: cheery-through- the-tears, with every complication spelled out and quickly resolved.
