An average movie

After 10 long years during which he managed to release only the really obscure ‘I Heart Huckabees’, David O. Russell  made an impressive come-back with the very neat ‘The Fighter’ and following this come-back, Russell has been quite productive releasing 4 movies in just 6 years. Well, from all these movies, I really loved ‘Silver Linings Playbook’ which became no less then one of my all-time favorite movies but I already had a hard time with ‘American Hustle’ which was rather overrated in my opinion and this feature was even weaker, I’m afraid. The main problem I had is that, in spite of all the efforts from Russell and his stellar cast, I had a hard time to care about this true story about the woman who invented the marvelous self-wringing mop. Seriously, I thought it was pretty obvious that Russell tried to spice up the whole thing by making Joy’s family quirky and even downright weird just to cover up the fact that there was actually nothing really fascinating about this tale. It reminded me of ‘Flash of Genius’ which was a really obscure movie about the inventor of the intermittent windshield wiper. The story itself was nothing really amazing but the approach (how this inventor was ripped off by Ford and how he became obsessed with his battle against this corportation) was really interesting. Well, in this case, the approach chosen by Russell (focusing on Joy and her quirky family members) really didn’t work. To conclude, in spite of its flaws, thanks to the really neat cast involved, it was still a decent watch and I still think it is worth a look though but Russell should maybe take a little bit more time on his next project to make sure that it really works this time.