Reception
The film earned mixed reviews from critics. Vincent Canby wrote "Not since Howard the Duck has there been a big-budget comedy with feet as flat as those of Joe Versus the Volcano. Many gifted people contributed to it, but there's no disbelieving the grim evidence on the screen." Roger Ebert gave it 3.5 out of four stars and called it "new and fresh and not shy of taking chances"; the film "achieves a kind of magnificent goofiness. Hanks and Ryan are the right actors to inhabit it, because you can never catch them going for a gag that isn't there: They inhabit the logic of this bizarre world and play by its rules."He later brought the film to Ebertfest 2012 and wondered "why he gave 3.5 stars instead of 4."
Upon its release, Time magazine called it a "wan bit of whimsy ... makes no more sense than its synopsis, though Meg Ryan beguiles in three different roles." Fifteen years later, Time critic Richard Schickel listed it as one of his "Guilty Pleasures"; while acknowledging "there are people who think this film...may be the worst big budget film of modern times", Schickel disagreed, saying "if you set aside the routine comic expectations its marketing encouraged, you may find yourself entranced by a movie that is utterly sui generis." Joe Versus the Volcano holds a score of 56% on Rotten Tomatoes based on 25 reviews.
Read more about this topic: Joe Versus The Volcano
Famous quotes containing the word reception:
“Satire is a sort of glass, wherein beholders do generally discover everybody’s face but their own; which is the chief reason for that kind of reception it meets in the world, and that so very few are offended with it.”
—Jonathan Swift (1667–1745)
“To aim to convert a man by miracles is a profanation of the soul. A true conversion, a true Christ, is now, as always, to be made by the reception of beautiful sentiments.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“But in the reception of metaphysical formula, all depends, as regards their actual and ulterior result, on the pre-existent qualities of that soil of human nature into which they fall—the company they find already present there, on their admission into the house of thought.”
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