Side Effects Reviews
NECN
Its big twist is telegraphed so soon after its start, there's zero shock value and zero suspense as the film plods towards its pathetically pat ending.
Full Review
| Original Score: C-
Schmoes Know
Stick around, Mr. Soderbergh, you have a better walk-off film in you than this one.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.9/5
The Skinny
A ludicrous thriller disguised as a sociopolitical statement on the US pharmaceutical industry.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/5
ABC Radio Brisbane
What starts out as an intriguing drama degenerates into a silly thriller during its later stages. The rules of logic don't seem to apply.
Full Review
| Original Score: C+
tonymacklin.net
Hitch used illogic, but he never plummeted into hokum as Side Effects does.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.0/5
EntertainmentTell
Starts out as a unique, fascinating and very daring movie, until it abruptly clicks and turns into something completely different and not nearly as good.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/5
Top CriticIn trying to merge this alarmist theme with an old-fashioned murder mystery, the filmmakers throw at least one plot-twist sucker-punch too many, leaving the viewer with an "Oh, come on" reaction to the entire film.
Zap2it.com
The narrative twists and turns ... are no match for the far more interesting mystery still unfolding off screen.
Full Review
| Original Score: C+
The List
Side Effects boasts a fine cast, an authentic milieu and a script that flirts with the experimental. But it also underwhelms in the crucial final third.
Reeling Reviews
..Soderbergh and Burns were trying to make a statement about Big Pharma and the American Healthcare system within the structure of the thriller genre, but their insistence on building upon one 'shocking' revelation after the next becomes ludicrous quickly
Full Review
| Original Score: C
SSG Syndicate
Sleek and stylish yet silly and far-fetched, it dissolves into a cinematic depressant.
Full Review
| Original Score: 5/10
Movie Habit
Soderbergh's latest (and possibly last) proves involving right until the penultimate act
The movie descends into a TV-grade police procedural, with twists so sharp and a plot so convoluted you may need meds to clear your head.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/4
"Side Effects" has the sleek, chic look of a Soderbergh film -- cool colors, seductive lighting -- but the script, by frequent collaborator Scott Z. Burns, is disappointingly clunky.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/4
Movies With Butter
Courtroom drama, forensic thriller, romantic murder mystery...It's as if, the prescription for genre side effects, is more genres.
The emotional depths of the film's first half get bludgeoned by the simplistically lurid twists and turns, which hinge on some egregiously homophobic stereotypes that Soderbergh's clinical touch fails to complicate.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/5
Old School Reviews
turns out to be a psychological thriller that uses pharmaceuticals as the MacGuffin
Full Review
| Original Score: C
Looking Closer
The surprises aren't much to get excited about. They come from the Magic 8 Ball of Hollywood Plot Twists, as arbitrary as they are implausible.
Full Review
| Original Score: C+
Commercial Appeal (Memphis, TN)
As smart and stylish as one would expect, but like Soderbergh's other recent artsy genre essays - 'Haywire,' 'Contagion' - its duller than its sources (in this case, 'Bigger Than Life,' 'Basic Instinct' and 'Psycho').
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/4
DustinPutman.com
Beginning as an urgent indictment and culminating in a silly, sudsy about-face that means very little and is sure to produce groans, the film betrays and cheats itself out of a point.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/4
