Amy Schumer's New Movie Is a Flop

It's another disappointing showing for Amy Schumer, say critics, who've given new flick I Feel Pretty a 36% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. (Audiences were even less kind, at 26%.) Alongside other funny females like Busy Philipps, Aidy Bryant, and Sasheer Zamata, Schumer stars as a self-conscious woman whose confidence is magically boosted when she hits her head. Four takes:

• "The movie is seriously suboptimal," writes Manohla Dargis at the New York Times, noting "the idea that a lack of self-confidence can be essentially bootstrapped away ... is an exhausted, false fairy tale." But "Schumer puts out so much energy in I Feel Pretty that it's hard not to feel charged up" and "the laughs land often enough that you can go, if somewhat begrudgingly, with the messy flow," Dargis writes.
• Peter Howell mostly agrees. Though there's a "happy conclusion," the film "upholds the hoary Hollywood tradition of pretending that a woman turns invisible and unlovable if she's not a candidate for the cover of Vogue," he writes at the Toronto Star, though he credits Schumer for "completely and fearlessly buying into the premise, and delivering a few good lines."

• Moira MacDonald found the movie "at times depressing." The "body-positive message gets lost" since the "humor depends on us finding it funny that a woman who looks like Amy Schumer (which is to say attractive and blond) would be confident about her appearance," she writes at the Seattle Times.
• The movie "wears thin" as it "rarely addresses … modern-day image issues in an intelligent or even hilarious way," Mara Reinstein puts it at Us Weekly. "If a movie is going to put a spin on the transformation comedy, it should be more sophisticated and self-aware. All this entry does is prove the point that the genre itself is in desperate need of a makeover."

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