Metacritic reviews

A French comedy that pitches for wit over broad comedy, it's successful in salting what could be a over-sugary confection with healthy dose of wryness. The result is always entertaining and rarely mawkish.

Starbuck is unapologetic genre filmmaking with a winning performance from its lead, Huard ( Bon Cop, Bad Cop), a shambling, likeable comedian who can flip, flop and fly off a diving board while maintaining his sex appeal.

It’s a smidge too cute and a bit too long, but Huard and Scott make this comical journey (in French and “Franglish” with English subtitles), a trip from indifference to kindness, incompetence to responsibility, a most rewarding reinvention of what “family” can mean.

A lovable underachiever unwittingly spawns his own village in Starbuck, Ken Scott's crowd-pleasing comedy exploring various meanings of fatherhood in the modern age.

A potent comedy of genetic chaos, Starbuck is pointedly contemporary and occasionally cloying, but guaranteed to draw attention for its premise and central character.

Huard’s charm offsets the plots contrivances, while Ken Scott’s finely balanced direction humanises the high concept.

What could have been one long, smutty joke ends up turning into a moving slice of midlife.

Almost all the charm of the real story is lost through the contrivances and overacting.

Yet another example of modern-family predicaments getting stuffed into the traditional-family-values message of conventional comedies.

The humor here is sitcom broad, and Scott displays little sense of rhythm; the film runs under two hours, but feels considerably longer.