ViewGuide

Created Aug 23, 2013 11:22AM PST • Edited Mar 21, 2019 04:15AM PST

1. Quality

2. Summary

   Barely OK 2.0

   Nicole Kidman’s frisky freak – while very transfixing – doesn’t rescue The Paperboy from decrepitude. It doesn’t help that she’s got a phony Southern accent, one of several in this miserable misfire of a movie.

   Charlotte Bless – one of the hottest harlots in cinematic history – has eyes for one man but pity for many, earning Kidman entrée into the erotic HoF. (After Meg Ryan from In The Cut, a movie Nic produced)

   Spotty dialogue, jerky editing and a bonfire of contemporaneous conservative vanities dog The Paperboy. Lame accents and inconsistent performances from the hot cast deliver the coup de grâce.

   So let’s get back to Charlotte Bless, who is super-sexy.

   She starts a prison visit to her crush by hiking up her skirt & ends it as a conjugal visit, sans XY touching. Wow.

   Later comes the infamous golden shower scene. Well, the golden shower as therapy scene. No really, therapy for jellyfish bites. Here’s how it works. Nicole Kidman shoves other girls out of the way, pushes aside her bikini bottom and pees all over Zac Efron. Not her best scene, though not for lack of trying.

   “Pulpy Sweaty” as another review supposedly calls it? Absolutely. Worth watching? Not so much.

4. Acting

   Good 3.0

   Nicole Kidman’s Charlotte Bless looks smoking hot, acts smolderingly hot, but enunciates like a wannabe Dixie Chick. Zac Efron looks like a pretty-boy James Dean but acts like a second-rate Soap Star. Matthew McConaughey never sells his identity conflict, so leaves us un-invested when it becomes a plot driver.

   Supporters:

   • Macy Gray opens the movie and then narrates it as a prominent family’s housekeeper. She does so competently if not charismatically.
   • Scott Glenn disappoints as a pillar of the (racist) community.
   • John Cusack is competent if underwhelming as a white trash felon. IOW, typical John Cusack.
   • Ned Bellamy impresses as his kin.
   • David Oyelowo smolders unconvincingly as a black journalist in the racist South of the late 60s.
   • Nealla Gordon makes an impressively unlikable Yankee woman.

5. Male Stars OK 2.5

   Efron – Barely OK. McConaughey – Good

6. Female Stars Very Good 3.5

   Nicole Kidman

7. Female Costars Good 3.0

8. Male Costars OK 2.5

10. Film

    Pretty Bad 1.5

    An overheated but merely parboiled Southern Gothic film that trades in heavy-handed and obvious tropes, The Paperboy is cheaply – albeit implausibly – sordid. Think that’s bad? The choppy editing is probably supposed to be artistic, but turns out to be mostly annoying.

    Lee Daniels, go to the back of the class.

11. Direction Bad 1.0

12. Play Bad 1.0

13. Music Barely OK 2.0

14. Visuals Very Good 3.5

    Nicole Kidman in that little blue dress ensures a high Visuals score all by itself.

15. Content

16. Edge

    Sordid 3.2

17. Sex Erotic 2.9

18. Violence Brutal 2.9

19. Rudeness Nasty 3.7

21. Reality

    Glib 1.6

    Left Wing pieties of white racism and the death penalty are set-up to be knocked down. “Conservative” equals racist. So when the two leading characters – brothers – have a Dad who’s “the most conservative man in town”, it matters.

    Of more interest is the movie’s spotlight on women who love psychopathic inmates from afar. Turns out there’s a website devoted to this. Of course there is.

22. Circumstantial Glib 2.0

23. Biological Glib 1.7

24. Physical Glib 1.2