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Critics Consensus: Trashy and melodramatic, The Paperboy is enlivened by a strong cast and a steamy, sordid plot, but it's uneven and often veers into camp.
Critic Consensus: Trashy and melodramatic, The Paperboy is enlivened by a strong cast and a steamy, sordid plot, but it's uneven and often veers into camp.
All Critics (147) | Top Critics (38) | Fresh (65) | Rotten (82) | DVD (1)
"The Paperboy" is one of those rare examples where you might wish the movie was less faithful to the book.
Yes, it's a dizzying stew set to boil.
The Paperboy is southern Gothic wallowing in the swamp of low camp. And if the wallowing were deliberate, this might have been hugely funny.
The Paperboy bears some promise as a good-bad movie, but it unfolds as a bad-bad one.
It's a movie that seems to have a mild form of heatstroke: it's blurry, as if filmed long ago, and feverish, and the story wanders all over the place as if lost in a bayou. When it's over, you want to wipe your brow.
The Paperboy is over-the-top every which way you look.
Set in the late 1960s, the movie is tactless, shameless and almost proudly seedy. Nevertheless, it is always highly watchable, prone to truly fascinate an audience as it also genuinely appalls them.
Efron's performance alone is worth taking a chance on Daniels' otherwise patchy picture.
Ultimately, The Paperboy is to be enjoyed for its ultra-camp performances, so delightfully hammy and over the top that they swiftly become mesmeric.
Fetid, scuzzy, revolting, funny, erotic, perplexing and provocative, it's like the bastard child of Cape Fear, Written On The Wind and Killer Joe.
If you like that freaky, perverted feeling of spying on an even bigger freak show, you will find this film both fascinating and horrible to watch.
Daniels turns out to be the ideal director for a film about the tendency of desire to turn sane minds to guacamole.
It looks and feels like something made in the 1970s but with a sordid quality that makes it so absurdly hilarious in all its filthy nonsense - thanks also to a terrific performance by Nicole Kidman as the trashy Southern blonde, who steals every scene she appears in.
Super Reviewer
Almost X rated - lots of graphic sex and violence. This is a very dark film, with people making terrible, tragic choices. Cusak, and McConaughey, were excellent....but, even great acting couldn't make all the ugliness worthwhile for me, or save a pointless script.
Set in the Jim Crow south during the civil rights movement, this lurid melodrama follows a college dropout as he helps his journalist brother investigate the case of a man who may have been wrongfully imprisoned; a strange love triangle heats up when he falls for the accused's nymphomaniacal death-row-groupie fiancee. The word "trashy" was invented for stories like this; it's as much fun as a stolen hump in the backseat of a 1965 Chevy Impala.
The movie begins on a promising note. I felt like it'd be a good thriller drama about a newspaper family conducting an investigation whether a convict on a death row deserves it. But it doesn't take long for the drama and thrills to fall into the contemporaries. The performances are excellent, though. Otherwise, just another movie based on a novel. I now understand why it's rated 6 on IMDb. * Make do with the linguistic mistakes. I MAY rewrite it properly in leisure.
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