Tammy

We've expected makeover narratives and personal-growth realizations from women on screen... in Tammy, we get a character - and her creator - patently uninterested in most of that journey. For Hollywood, that's radical.

'Tammy' is a disappointment, because it asks an energetic, unpredictable performer to play it so calculatingly, frustratingly safe.

The filmmakers never quite find the balance between real-life experience and freewheeling nonsense that drives the best comic road movies.

[Something] in Tammy you wouldn't expect to see in a mainstream comedy [is] the romantic pairing of McCarthy with indie heartthrob Mark Duplass, reversing the formula of the male slob who gets the conventionally beautiful girl.

The movie's principal intention is to make you laugh at a loser, and revel in scenes from which polite people would instinctively turn away.

The film, though, is as erratic as Tammy's driving, veering dangerously from gross-out comedy to rank sentimentality with no real sense of where it is headed.

Tammy is the slob comedy Alexander Payne is too dignified to write and direct.

Dead on arrival.

By the end of the credits Tammy doesn't feel like a comedy - although there are several giggles sprinkled throughout - as much as it does a waste of talent.

What detracts from the merriment is the film's need to kowtow to morals and lessons that are both generic and too heavy for the eccentric characters.