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Live! (2007)
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Reviews Counted:14
Fresh:6
Rotten:8
Average Rating:4.6/10
Consensus: Uneven media satire on how far TV will go to secure ratings. Unfortunately it’s neither as funny or as sharp as it hopes to be.
Starring: Eva Mendes, David Krumholtz, Eric Lively, Katie Cassidy
Starring: Eva Mendes, David Krumholtz, Eric Lively, Katie Cassidy, Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Jay Hernandez
Director: Bill Guttentag
Director: Bill Guttentag
Screenwriter: Bill Guttentag, Monet Mazur, Andre Braugher
Reviews for Live!
There is a big problem in believing any of it, but a certain amount of fun watching television’s more ghastly denizens wonder whether murder will improve the ratings. It does.
Mendes (best known as Will Smith’s love interest in Hitch) is enjoyably poisonous, making Live! just about worth catching.
This crass, inauthentic mock-doc exposing the evils of reality shows and the venality of TV honchos manages both to bore and insult simultaneously.
However, in a world where reality show formats are beyond parody, this particular gun goes off half-cocked.
Triumphs, humiliation, barmy monologues and temper tantrums - reality television is scarcely in need of parodying. Certainly not from a preachy film like this.
Bill Guttentag’s film is one of those shrill and cheery conspiracies on the wilder side of probability. But the black comedy has an infectious pace, and screwy logic.
A sporadically entertaining but uneven media satire that never quite delivers on its clear sense of moral outrage.
It’s hard to distinguish between the cynical indifference of the characters and the arrogant nihilism of the film itself.
Smart, incisive, but not as sharp as it should have been. With a subject this ripe for evisceration, it’s a pity to let it off with flesh wounds.
Watchable satire with some nice touches and a strong performance by Eva Mendes, but it's neither as funny, as clever or as original as it thinks it is.
This straight-faced satire of American television raises important issues and is engaging enough to keep us gripped. But the astute commentary peaks too early, then gives way to a finale that's messy in more ways than one.
Mendes' Courbet is all the c-words: clever, cunning, a control freak, cynical; ultimately conformist. Here's another c-word - Cowell, Simon Cowell. Like him, she knows what the public want - before even they know it.
So spake that prescient philosopher Julie Brown: "Just be vague, there's nothing to it."
Worth seeing for the slinky, snakelike, sexy and oddly vulnerable performance of Eva Mendes, a star-making role if I've ever seen one.
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