The Pursuit of Happyness

In an effort to make a crowd-pleasing film, the horrors that Gardner must have experienced on the streets feel glossed over by the Hollywood machine.

We may wonder if happiness can be bought this way, and whether the film being sold to us isn't a slightly suspect package, but Smith, sublime and moving, sells it regardless.

Deserves kudos for avoiding saccharine sentiment, but its relentless emphasis on money as the cure for all ills is depressing. They might as well have called it The Pursuit of Richyness.

Plays like an unravelling of the Eighties comedy hit Trading Places. Instead of a smart-Alec street hustler who turns the tables on his seemingly benign patrons, we have a smart saint who simply wants to join the club.

The film unspools like a souped-up vanity project.

One can detect almost the spirit of a public information film nagging the audience: look, people, the American Dream doesn't come for free.

It is Will Smith's lead performance in this that really stole the show and won me over. It really elevated this movie.

The Pursuit of Happyness reveals the soul-wasting nature of poverty and the lack of prospects for those condemned to economic oblivion.

Will Smith can carry a film. And carry it he does, because without him, Happyness would founder in its own schmaltz.

Director Gabriele Muccino has so overloaded the story with glib anecdotes that it's often depressing and, worse, monotonous. Everything that is admirable, and there is much, is down to Smith's verve.