Recensioni di Metacritic

Gracefully directed by Fried Green Tomatoes and Justified director Jon Avnet, Three Christs is a great dark comedy about a dark subject. I can’t say enough how great the performances are. It’s a relevant character study on those who suffer from mental illness and the ones who treat it and why they do.

Devolves from quiet character study into full-blown, over-the-top “star vehicle” in its last act.

Whether it is the star power of the cast or the seductiveness of the period recreation, Three Christs has an appealing professionalism — an odd fit for a film about challenging a profession.

An insipid, boring mess, Three Christs doesn’t even have the decency to be amusing, apart from Stephen Root’s forced delivery of the film’s title followed by a what-a-world head shake.

The cast can’t cure all the movie’s problems, from its abrupt ending to a random acid-test scene, but it’s not without its curious appeal as a star-studded failed “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” experiment.

Like the original experiment, this film fails when it tries to impose a conclusion, rather than letting its meaning reveal itself naturally.

By the end, it’s as if a good doctor’s god complex has been taken up by the film itself.

Three Christs opts in for frustratingly broad characters that feel like half-considered caricatures and Jeff Russo’s sentimental, strings-heavy score that flattens whatever modest edge the movie might have had.

As audiences, we trust filmmakers to do a reasonably accurate job of representing stories based in truth, and we get angry when they take the kind of liberties Avnet and company allow themselves here. As if it weren’t bad enough that Three Christs were boring, it’s impossible to believe, and for that, there is no cure.

Just an odd mess of a movie. That you feel anything at all is a tribute to the acting talent of Dinklage and Goggins, who occasionally make us care.