MBunge This is one of the worst written movies I've ever watched…and that's saying a lot. It compounds that by having one of the most annoying and intrusive soundtracks I've ever heard…and that's saying a lot. If Nobel Son had not had such a talented cast, I think I would have slit my throat before getting halfway through it.Barkley Michaelson (Bryan Greenberg) is a hapless sad sack who's working on his PhD thesis on cannibalism and trying to survive on a piddling allowance from his father. Eli Michaelson (Alan Rickman) is an insufferable a-hole who mistreats everyone around him, including his family and the women he screws on the side, and has just been awarded the Nobel Prize for Chemistry. Sarah Michaelson (Mary Steenburgen) is a forensic psychologist who…well, that's pretty much it for her. Sarah's about as generic and undefined a character as you get. The only reason she's a forensic psychologist and not a go-go dancer is that she needs to have the more impressive job to mouth a few lines of dialog that I'm sure the writers of this disaster were way too proud of.Just as the Michaelson family is about to fly to Stockholm to see Eli receive his prize, Barkley is kidnapped by Thaddeus James (Shawn Hatosy) and held for $2 million ransom. Thaddeus claims to be the spawn of one of Eli's affairs and wants revenge for Eli stealing his Nobel Prize winning idea from Thaddeus' non-biological father, who killed himself when he realized his wife had cheated on him with Eli. Even though Thaddeus kidnaps Barkley, their mutual animosity towards Eli causes them to team up and turn it into a fake kidnapping where they will split the money.Their scam succeeds, but then Thaddeus turns up to rent a room in the Michaelson's house and starts ingratiating himself with Eli, which seems to send Barkley around the bend and starts a game of cat-and-mouse where it's clear who the cat is but not always who's the mouse. Throw in a detective (Bill Pullman) with the hots for Sarah and an obviously unstable poet (Eliza Dushku) who boinks Barkely, and that's Nobel Son.I'm sure there are some dullards out there impressed with the many plot twists of this fast-moving piece of garbage. That's because they never notice the underlying story here doesn't make a lick of sense.Eli treats his wife like crap, even holding her up for public ridicule in front of all of his colleagues. In the entire film, there's only 30 seconds where these two characters show any affection or connection to each other and that happens 40 minutes into the movie. Is there any explanation for why Sarah, a smart woman with her own career, has stayed with this verbally and emotionally abusive bastard for so many years? No. Eli has nothing but contempt and disdain for Barkley, yet still very much wants him to be there when Eli gets his Nobel. Is there any explanation for that? No! When Eli gets the call about his son being kidnapped, he immediately assumes Barkley is pulling some sort of scam. That's a fairly bizarre first reaction, no matter how much ill will exists between them. Is there any explanation of why Eli would ever think Barkely could think up, let alone actually pull off, such an extreme deception? No!! The Almighty Plot Hammer needs a character to disappear to set up the film's conclusion. Is there any explanation of where she went or what happened to her? No!!! After the first 3/4ths of Nobel Son establishes Thaddeus as a violent, sociopathic genius who knows everything about everyone and crafts incredibly intricate plans, in the last 1/4th he becomes a quivering buffoon who doesn't have a clue what the hell he's doing. Is there any explanation for that transformation? NO!!! Is the audience ever given a single reason to sympathize or identify with Barkley, a limp wristed and pretentious douche who's too damn lazy to get a job so he doesn't have to live on a $35 dollar allowance from his jerk of a daddy? NOOOOOOO!!!!!Oh, and even though Nobel Son is clearly set in 2007, the entire plot is dependent on no one in the film having a cell phone. If even one character had a cell, none of the story would have worked at all.This movie is just filled with stuff that falls apart if you think about any of it for more than two seconds. Intensifying the painful suckage is this irritating techno pop music that co-writer/director Randall Miller constantly slathers over almost every scene. Watching Nobel Son is like being a quadriplegic fan of Beethoven and Bach stuck in a warehouse while a teenage rave with the worst synthesized music in the world goes on around you.This motion picture is almost as terrible as the most wretched thing to ever burst out of the mind of Michael Bay. Don't watch it.

rwtmoore This movie demonstrates everything that's wrong with Hollywood.The overall story isn't that bad; it's the execution. This movie is filled to the brim with myriad plot holes, implausible situations and dialog, lame humor and laughable attempts at poignancy. And if that's not bad enough, it's also crammed with clichéd sound effects, unrelated trendy music and an array of un-called-for camera tricks and 'cool' editing. There's so much absurd stuff here, it would take me hundreds of pages to explain it all. Almost every aspect of this film is so implausible, that right from the start I could not suspend my disbelief.It's as if the filmmakers decided to use every cool camera movement and editing that they ever saw and shoehorn it into this movie. That, coupled with the bad music choices, make the tone of this thing jump all over the place. It's disjointed and lacks a unified feel.Why are the characters introduced with typing across the screen? This is a pathetic cliché that goes back to espionage type movies, so why is it here? Who's documenting the case? This movie doesn't know what it wants to be. It tries desperately to be Frank Capra, Alfred Hitchcock, Spike Lee and Quentin Tarantino all rolled into one and it just doesn't work. Barkley narrates at the beginning and end of this movie. If it is supposed to be seen through Barkley's eyes, then we've been cheaply duped, because a ton of stuff has been left out that would have been shown to the audience. You can't have a character narrate and then hide what he sees and hears from the audience. It's a cheap trick.The tip of the iceberg of plot holes and implausibilities: What is the purpose of the gardener character? He could be removed and the story wouldn't change one bit. And why was he murdered? It seems absurd that they'd kill him just to vacate the apartment. These are supposed to be brilliant people; wasn't there a less illegal, less violent way to accomplish that? And what's with linking OCD with electric cars? The filmmakers often try to make a correlation between things that don't correlate. The Pat Benitar thing was a sad attempt at making a poignant link between the brothers. And how convenient was it that he left City Hall's apartment without his shoes. No one I know has ever been in that much of a hurry. He couldn't just carry them along with his shirt? Like so much of this script it's unbelievably contrived.If there's been four thumbs taken in the last month wouldn't it be on the news? Wouldn't everybody know about it? And, if so, why is it crucial to send a thumb, to show you mean business, when everyone knows it's probably not the kidnap victim's thumb. And how did they get the Mini-Cooper in the apartment? Where did the brothers meet and plan it all? How did they know about each other? And Eli's dialog about molecules luminescing is over-the-top sophomoric.Thaddeus spends a significant amount of time telling us how much of a horrible person his father is. Then, instantly, he wants his father to be proud of him and he wants to follow in his footsteps. What? He wants to steal other people's work and mess around with grad students and other people's wives? And Barkley seems like a dork even after we're shown that he's some kind of evil genius. I know a heck of a lot of Phds and not one of them ever played a Gameboy. And his mother is proud that he's an evil genius, because I guess, she's kind of evil too, even though she appears to have lived a successful and upstanding life for the past 50-odd years. Another cheap trick. OK, we get that people aren't all bad or all good. What a revelation. I think I got it when I was ten years old. And just in case we didn't get the message, Barkley actually tells us that during the opening credits.Fortunately, City Hall lit one hundred candles near her bed on the roof, just in case, she brings home Barkley, virtually a stranger, many hours later. And wouldn't it be funny if Barkley woke up in the morning and stretched, but forgot that he was naked and outdoors in bright sunlight and somebody saw him. Hilarious. If I was twelve years old again. Who's ever heard of moo-shu? I've been eating moo-shi for longer than Barkley's been alive.And we're spoon-fed embarrassing amounts of exposition: Thaddeus chronicling the gardener's history, Eli's history, etc. And just in case we missed the fact that City hall has done something twisted, don't worry, because right after she does it, a song is played that tells us that she's a twisted girl. And Barkley tells his whole personal situation to a clerk at a café. It's ridiculous. I've never seen such bad exposition. It's just lazy writing it really insults the intelligence of the viewer.There's the poetry reading place, where predictably, everyone's poetry is ludicrous, except, of course, City Hall's. I mean, this gag's got whiskers on it.And what's with the twisted logic of Sarah, "I hope it's Barkley's thumb. If it's somebody else's thumb then the kidnapper is a calculating psychopath." So, by that logic, if the kidnapper cuts off Barkley's thumb, then he's a psychopath, just not a calculating one. OK, I'll be on planet earth if anybody needs me.You can't tell what's going happen because you're not given enough information. They've stacked the deck where you can't possibly figure it out and by the end there's so many ridiculous and implausible situations that you don't care. A mystery must include all the info needed to get it. Otherwise, it's cheap trick, which is what this is.

brent cole This really was a hard film to watch. And considering many of these known actors are usually quite good I have to assume that the Director wanted to take a fine group of actors and make them look and act as bad as possible. Or this was made with a lot of favors and now lost friendships. The lighting was horrific. Either that or the cast has aged twenty years recently. Mary, Bill; everyone except Danny looked like they had become old soft and wrinkled over night. The dialogue........who on earth wrote the dialogue. Yeah this in one of those films where you see a cast of mismatched actors who have aged and no one wants to hire them. So they take a film, any film and grab the pay check. EXCEPT that this particular group of actors are NOT that. These are all good actors, these are wonderful actors. And when I see wonderful actors who work in a show like this I have to guess a favor is at hand.

siderite The only reason I grade this movie with a 5 are Eliza Dushku's thonged buttocks in one scene. Other than that it was a complete fail on all levels. Imagine a planned con of the type you see in Ocean's Eleven, with the same silly music and the Mini Cooper cars taken from another heist movie I don't remember the name of, but all related to the dysfunctional family of a Nobel laureate. It might still be nice if it weren't for all the murders and mutilations, all done on the same silly music. And if that weren't enough, the plot has so many holes it went fractal!What were Alan Rickman and Bill Pullman (both actors that I respect a lot) doing in a piece of ... film like this? The only decent thing in this movie was the cast. Bottom line: stay away! It's so averagely bad that it doesn't even count as a movie. It's like one of those uninspired cleaning solution commercials.