“A pint of Guinness with no yeast.”
It is fair to say that Wild Mountain Thyme is probably the most anticipated movie to be seen by Irish viewers right now… but maybe for all the wrong reasons. That first trailer received quite the reaction in Ireland, and rightly so.
The movie features amazing on-screen talent Emily Blunt, Jamie Dornan, Jon Hamm, and Christopher Walken, as well as Oscar-winning writer/director John Patrick Shanley (Moonstruck, Doubt) behind the camera, so it should have been a home-run.
American critics have got to see the movie ahead of the release there this Friday, and these are just some of our favourite quotes from some of the first reviews:
Indiewire – “The only logical explanation for what happened here is that someone planted a bomb in Shanley’s editing bay and timed it to explode if any cut of Wild Mountain Thyme dipped below 50 kilohertz of cartoon Irish charm per minute.”
Chicago Tribune – “The music is drippy and constant, the wobble from comedy to drama feels off, and the dialects have been reamed in the Irish press. Charm resists calculation; even if actors get some going, even if a writer creates an approximation in or between the lines, deliberately manufactured charm curdles so easily. The one success story of Wild Mountain Thyme belongs to Blunt, who has yet to give a poor or lazily considered performance.”
Slant – “Why does Anthony so steadfastly resist the advances of the lovely and obviously interested Rosemary, and why does she continue to tolerate his rude, borderline insane daddy’s-boy gestures? Shanley provides a memorably ludicrous answer, but the real reason is that otherwise there would be no film.”
The Hollywood Reporter – “A pint of Guinness with no yeast… a limp dollop of Irish whimsy that never sparks to life.”
AV Club – “If you are one of those mischievous little devils who thrives on onscreen chaos, however, Wild Mountain Thyme is for you. Everyone else? Not so much.”
The Guardian – “The story is ostensibly set in the present day, yet no character uses a cellphone or the internet. Anthony and Rosemary are allegedly in their mid-to-late 30s, yet there’s no indication of a romantic history or even life before the first scene (were they friends growing up? Teenage lovers? Did they live as neighbours for decades and just … not speak?)”
Now, to be fair, some of the early reviews actually have leaned towards positivity, with the San Francisco Chronicle scoring it 3 out of 4, while the Associated Press stated that “Wild Mountain Thyme might be just the understated blend you need for a cold December night.”
But at the time of writing, the movie does have a score of 33% on Rotten Tomatoes, which is bad, but not nearly as bad as we’d all presumed it would be.
We’re not sure if that is better or worse? Did we really WANT it to be so-bad-its-good? We’ll know for sure when Wild Mountain Thyme opens in Irish cinemas in early 2021.
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