TwittingOnTrender

This is a horrible, dingy, drab and depressing movie. Yes, every line is an attempted Neil Simon zinger but they fall completely flat in this tepid context.

Lemmon is an actor I have never taken to - I see him as a prize ham who always sets my teeth on edge. Here, he sweatily ups the ante with a five o'clock shadow, damp shirt and crumpled suit, coupled with an irascible, hair-trigger personality that leaves you wanting to shake him and tell him to grow up and pull himself together.

Bancroft does her best, despite being lumbered with a terrible wig (at least I HOPE it's not her own hair) and a script that has her playing a doormat for most of the movie's length. Everyone overacts to beat the band, and the whole thing is so hard on the eye - what must those burglars have thought when they walked into this dowdy, cluttered apartment? So much of what we are supposed to find funny derives from shouting - the running gag about bellowing through the wall at the oversexed cabin-crew neighbours, for example - but I didn't laugh, I reached for the painkillers.

These manic, dental-drill scenes go on and on, reaching their apogee with the snow-shovel sequence - how long does it take to rip the brown paper off a snow-shovel? And...they wrapped a snow-shovel in brown paper down at the hardware store?? No wonder resources are running low 47 years later.

I'm so sorry I subjected my wife to this.

(Avoids a one-star review by virtue of the lovely but all too scarce New York location footage)

I always love it when the 10 star reviewers feel they need to include attacks on the negative reviews. It makes me realise I'm correct in my assessment and the production under review is no good when its defenders have to scrape around for justification - we plebs just don't "get" it, we were expecting "belly laughs" or that old favourite, "it's Irish humour, you wouldn't understand". Well, as to the last, I'm a fully qualified Gael but don't actually believe in the concept of "Irish" humour, no more than I do Nigerian humour nor Martian humour. Funny is funny and doesn't need to be justified by nationality. As for belly-laughs, I would never expect anything with Graham Norton's name on it to provide me with laughs of any kind, but I had read a couple of good reviews of this.

Dull, pretentious, finger-wagging, the usual misandry and white-bashing - Kathy Burke, a working class Londoner, how could you put your name to this?

The accents are dreadful. At least TRY. There was supposed to be a big point made by the black detective describing himself as a Dubliner but in reality Ireland to its credit has been a melting pot since the Eighties and a person of colour would not raise any eyebrows, much less be asked where they were from! The lesbian storyline was telegraphed a mile off, we had gays, we had every race and colour under the sun...just your typical Cork village!

Well, I guess I'll just have to stick to Mrs Brown for my belly laughs and something my tiny brain can cope with!

As a lifelong fan of Jack Nicholson, I sought this out because it appears to be his final movie. What a sad farewell to possibly our greatest ever actor. He does nothing wrong with the little he's given, and it's so nice to see him onscreen, but my, what a sorry excuse for a movie. Reese Witherspoon, a pretty lady, spends a lot of her time wearing the ugliest shorts I've ever seen. This is emblematic of the movie - take some good ingredients and make them unappealing.

A story that is barely there, meandering like a confused senior in a department store. Incredibly slack editing - two hours?? Ye Gods, this could have lost 40 minutes and still seemed like a slog. Scenes go on, and on, and on, Rudd and Witherspoon exchanging dialogue that is as sharp and witty as the list of ingredients on a soup packet. Special mention for the obnoxious performance of Owen Wilson - a character that is supposed to be shallow, I get it, but played with smug disdain by an actor who almost seems to have one hand out for his cheque throughout.

So goodbye Jack, thanks for Chinatown, thanks for Cuckoo's Nest, thanks for all of those great moments. We forgive you the choices you made to bulk out your bank balance so you could afford to make The Crossing Guard and Blood and Wine. We even forgive you for this aberration.