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Finding Amanda (2008)
Tomatometer
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Reviews Counted:40
Fresh:17
Rotten:23
Average Rating:5.2/10
Consensus: Despite a charming turn by Matthew Broderick, Finding Amanda is too flimsily executed to succeed as a dark comedy.
Synopsis:
From director Peter Tolan, creator of the hit television series Rescue Me, comes Finding Amanda, a hilarious and heartbreaking autobiographical comedy about the compulsions we can’t shake, and the...
From director Peter Tolan, creator of the hit television series Rescue Me, comes Finding Amanda, a hilarious and heartbreaking autobiographical comedy about the compulsions we can’t shake, and the unlikely lengths we’ll go to while trying.
Taylor Mendon (Matthew Broderick) is a television writer and producer working on a low-rated, little-respected half-hour sitcom. Once destined for bigger and better things, Taylor's compulsive gambling, recreational drug use and drinking all conspired to throw his career off the rails. After kicking the alcohol and drugs, he only has one more hurdle...the horses.
His beautiful twenty - year old niece Amanda (Brittany Snow) has her own habit to kick. Living in Las Vegas, working as a "dancer," her family has just discovered she is actually a prostitute, and they suspect hooking for drug money.
On their way home from an emergency family meeting, Taylor's wife Lorraine (Maura Tierney) finds recent racing stubs in Taylor's glove compartment. After years of standing by him, she leaves.
Taylor comes up with a plan: he'll win back his wife by doing the right thing. He'll go to Las Vegas, find Amanda, and deliver her to a rehabilitation center in Malibu. While he’s at it, he might even catch up with some old friends (like slimy casino host Steve Coogan). But besides that, it’s strictly the business at hand—while he's there, he vows, he won't gamble a single cent, but things don’t turn out quite as he’d planned. --© Magnolia Films
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Starring: Matthew Broderick, Brittany Snow, Maura Tierney, Peter Facinelli
Starring: Matthew Broderick, Brittany Snow, Maura Tierney, Peter Facinelli, Steve Coogan, Bill Fagerbakke
Director: Peter Tolan
Director: Peter Tolan
Screenwriter: Peter Tolan
Producer: Wayne Rice, Richard Heller
Composer: Christopher Tyng
Studio: Mitropoulos Films
Reviews for Finding Amanda
Offers a steady supply of clever lines but suffers from the patina of self-loathing common to industry lifers and the unfortunate miscasting of straight-arrow Broderick as a depressed, cynical hack.
Offers up some zinger lines in the trenches of Sin City but fails to live up to its ingenious concept.
Matthew Broderick regains his cinematic stride as a morosely wise-cracking television producer on the skids, ably abetted by Maura Tierney as his much-put-upon wife and Brittany Snow as his perky prostitute niece.
This unromantic comedy is something less than a sure bet. For some reason, you get the impression that it doesn't live up to the promise of its premise.
This vulgar film, replete with vile language and graphic descriptions of sex acts, degrades our culture. Even George Carlin might find it offensive.
Broderick’s sunny spin on the deeply flawed Taylor is interesting but eventually defies belief. In the third act, Finding Amanda loses steam altogether.
Though Finding Amanda's story reaches a reasonably satisfying conclusion, the empty characters at its center make the whole thing feel like a waste.
Doesn't have a nuance in it, but it's pretty consistently amusing in its latter-day Woody Allen way. For most of the way, its morals are happily, believably wrong, but all bad things must come to an end.
Finding Amanda has some of the good and a lot of the bad aspects of a first film written and directed by the same person.
Much of Finding Amanda doesn't stand up to close scrutiny, but at its best the still-boyish Broderick suggests his most famous character, Ferris Bueller, going through a midlife crisis.
Tolan writes regularly for smart shows like Rescue Me, but his best instincts deserted him when he set his sights on the big screen for the first time.
Written with more bite, the premise might hold up, but as executed here by Tolan, it is a soft-hearted, haphazard mess.
Writer-director Peter Tolan has glibness down pat, but can't quite wring the intended pathos from his characters' desperate lives. He does, however, give Broderick his best part since Election.
Too much of Peter Tolan's movie takes up Taylor's self-absorption as if it's actually interesting.
Set mostly in Las Vegas, Finding Amanda offers a vision of confused Americans losing their already shaky bearings in the world’s gaudiest honky-tonk.
This cloying comedy is barely enlivened by its talented stars who both deserve much better.
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