A Good Old-Fashioned Orgy opens tonight, featuring all sorts of funny people trying to organize some late-summer group sex. Much like real orgies, the critics don’t seem to be fully on board with it. Roger Ebert says that “It strands fairly likable actors in a morass of the kind of dialogue only stupid characters ever say — and then only when reading stupid screenplays. No one in the movie has a morsel of intelligence. They all seem to be channeling more successful characters in better comedies. This would be touching if it were not so desperate.” The Chicago Tribune’s Michael Phillips didn’t care for the characters either, saying that they’re “insufferable bores, and the orgy seems to go on forever.” Nathan Rabin at The AV Club was slightly nicer about it, saying that it “takes its cues from Sudeikis’ character and performance: It’s randy, good-natured, moderately amusing, and charming in a glib, facile way.”
Not everyone was so down on it, however. Time’s Mary Pols called it “a frequently very funny movie about planning and executing exactly what the title describes.” And Time Out NY’s Joshua Rothkopf says that “All of this is way smarter than it needs to be — and it’s only the prologue to the main event, which explodes the film into awkwardness but a weird kind of triumph, too.” And you can’t really argue with an orgy that ends with an explosive triumph.
