MOVIE REVIEWS: YOU AGAIN

You Again is one of those films that people in the industry like to say was not so much released but allowed to escape. It is arriving with little promotion, suggesting that the studio was not about to throw good money after bad. Among critics in the major cities, there’s not a single positive review. It may have an impressive female cast that includes Sigourney Weaver, Jamie Lee Curtis, Kristen Bell and Betty White, but Roger Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times remarks that “they’re stuck in a movie that gives their characters not even a chance at a human characteristic.” Comments Carrie Rickey in the Philadelphia Inquirer: “Wht a waste of talented actresses.” While the film is billed as a comedy, Stephen Holden writes in the New York Times that “there is not a laugh to be found in this rancid, misogynistic revenge comedy.” Roger Moore in the Orlando Sentinel describes it as “joke-starved.” And most of the critics reach the conclusion that Claudia Puig tersely synopsizes this way in USA Today: “You Again is ultra-familiar, forced and repetitive.”