Clooney the Looney continues his bad movie streak according to Rex Reed:
I took home nothing from the alleged comedy Intolerable Cruelty except a pounding headache. This dim-witted, mean-spirited and brain-dead calamity should surprise no one. It’s a labored farce written, produced and directed by the lucky, indestructible and only mildly talented Coen brothers, Ethan and Joel (I forget which one does which), who hit pay dirt with Fargo and have been digging unsuccessfully ever since to hit more. They finally hit rock-bottom with the abominable and grotesquely out-of-control O Brother, Where Art Thou?, proving that whatever their strengths, comedy is not one of them. That doesn’t seem to deter these cool, misguided dudes (or the fools who back their projects with actual money, like Brian Grazer) for more than a few years at a time. According to the press notes, Intolerable Cruelty was eight years in the planning; it seems to have been completed in fewer than eight hours, including George Clooney’s latte breaks. How do these fakes do it? Who among us can know?
The glaringly unfunny premise in this divorce-court fairy tale assumes that it’s gotta be a riot when the king of summary judgments (George Clooney) meets his match in a serial divorcée (Catherine Zeta-Jones) who bankrupts husbands and disbars lawyers before breakfast, right? Wrong. You cannot believe the endless number of deadly contrivances that await you as Mr. Clooney, a heartless divorce attorney who has invented the world’s most foolproof prenup, defeats Ms. Zeta-Jones, a conniving gold-digger who is in the process of dumping a kinky, philandering real-estate tycoon for everything he’s got. Ending up with nothing but the sable on her toned and tawny back, she sets out to get even by quickly marrying and disposing of a corny, redneck oil tycoon (Billy Bob Thornton). This time she’s ready for all opponents. Naturally, in the tradition of hackneyed Hollywood hokum, the two enemies fall in love and marry in kilts to the cacophony of a bagpipe band in Las Vegas.
The next morning, the divorce attorney who stopped at nothing in the past to win a case, slandering and perjuring his way through the judicial system and leaving the broken women of America for grease spots on the side of the road, now finds himself jilted by his own wife, who is a cross between a Playboy centerfold and Lucrezia Borgia. The rest is a title bout of world-class double revenge in which she breaks his heart and wrecks his career while the lame filmmakers dream up a desperate volume of dull ways to dispose of a never-ending assortment of prenuptial agreements. (Billy Bob Thornton eats his dipped in barbecue sauce.) Vulnerable, naked and in love, Mr. Clooney finally gets his long-overdue comeuppance, mugging and winking with the same kind of self-indulgent clown faces that pass for charm in Hugh Grant movies.
After numerous films, Mr. Clooney still can’t act, and his flat, monotonous voice is pitched just south of a dial tone. But at least he doesn’t give the impression of taking the acting profession seriously, and he has such a jolly disposition nobody seems to mind. Ms. Zeta-Jones strikes a lot of superficial poses, looking the way glamorous movie stars used to when they were photographed by Horst and Hurrell. A pathetic follow-up to that Oscar-winning role in Chicago, if you ask me. The movie has no pace or tone or style. It just drags on and on, like a donkey cart with the wheels missing. The title Intolerable Cruelty must refer to the way it treats its audience. Link
Also at that link a review of Mystic River with two of our favorites, Timmy Robbins and Sean Penn. From Rex's review it appears to be the movie to see if you're a crack whore and want to feel better about your life.