Somebody to love

St. Vincent

Crit

I'd never call 102 minutes spent with Bill Murray wasted, but this may be about as close as it gets: a comedy that's intellectually lazy and emotionally sloppy, that buys most of its laughs and all its tears on the cheap--or maybe on the abilities of a formidable cast to make chicken salad from canned sardines. Murray does a bad Brooklyn accent as the titualar mistanthrope with a hidden heart of gold, Naomi Watts does a bad Russian accent as the hooker with a hidden heart of gold, and Chris O'Dowd does an excellent Irish brogue as the priest with an ostentatious heart of Crosby. O'Dowd actually provides some of the best laughs but none of the plausibilty the film desperately needs. What there is of that comes from an unusually restrained Melissa McCarthy as a mother who has left her cheating husband and is caught between imperatives economic and domestic; unfortunately, her son (the blameless newcomer Jaeden Lieberher), who inevitably bonds with the grump next door and liberates his humanity, is standard issue troubled kid number 14.