Arthur Reviews

Disappointingly tepid despite a great cast, you can see how the 2011 remake of the 1981 Dudley Moore comedy Arthur seemed like a good idea on paper. You start with a script that unadventurously retreads the original, hoping to please the people who liked the first movie. Then you place a rakish comedian of odd stature in the leading role, banking on his biting asides and improvised commentary to keep the hardcore comedy fans laughing while the story unfolds. What could go wrong? For those unfamiliar with the premise, Arthur is a story about a debauched, drunken playboy named Arthur Bach (Russell Brand). The sole heir to a multi-million-dollar corporate empire, Arthur’s inebriated antics (soliciting prostitutes, getting DUI’s while driving the Batmobile) have spooked his family into giving him an ultimatum: follow through with an arranged marriage to the business-friendly but altogether mean Susan Johnson (Jennifer Garner), or lose his inheritance. Arthur could almost live with this plan, as could his nanny/valet/sole maternal figure, Hobson (Helen Mirren), who would be happy to share the responsibility of wrangling a 35-year-old man with unlimited funds and a drinking problem. The only hitch is that Arthur has just fallen in love with a happy-go-lucky working-class girl named Naomi (Greta Gerwig), whose quirky outfits and chin-up sense of Manic Pixie Dream Girl integrity inspire him to make himself a better man. Unfortunately, the script for Arthur is totally uninspired. Every step in the plotline feels standard and canned, especially a subplot shoehorned in about Naomi being an aspiring children’s book author. Her cheery musings about always feeling like the moon is following her and her work-in-progress manuscript about the Statue of Liberty falling in love with the Chrysler Building add up to a terrible, contrived homage to the original Arthur’s theme song (Christopher Cross’ refrain about “the moon and New York City”) that is way, way worse than it sounds -- and it sounds bad. Of course, even the cheesiest script would probably be forgivable if there were any real chemistry between Brand and Gerwig -- but there is not. There’s a vacuum between them onscreen that no amount of offhanded, pithy observation from Brand can make up for, and given the choice, you’d probably rather watch him interact with Garner and Mirren for the entire film. Brand himself does a great job tackling the material he’s been given, but the smart, talky comedy he was probably hired for falls completely flat in a movie with no regard for pacing, and a narrative too soulless to inspire much laughter.