Adam Scott’s new movie, A.C.O.D., short for Adult Children of Divorce, opens nationwide today, and the critics can’t seem to agree on the film’s merits. The movie, in which Scott’s character discovers he was the subject of a best-selling book about the effects of divorce on children while trying to manage the peace at a family wedding, currently has a 52% rotten rating at RottenTomates and a 50/100 on Metacritic.
On the more positive side, Entertainment Weekly calls it “a bubbly-smart romantic comedy” and praises Scott for his “highly controlled, almost overly impeccable charisma.” The Hollywood Reporter says that it “displays more psychological insight than most comedies built around a protagonist’s ‘issues’” and says it’s “funny but less successful as comedy than as a cry of you-screwed-us-up solidarity.”
In the middle, The A.V. Club says the film “is too broad to qualify as incisive, too mild to rise above the level of amusing,” but praises the casting, particularly Richard Jenkins and Catherine O’Hara as Scott’s long-divorced parents. The Village Voice calls it “an anomaly of sorts, a comedy jam-packed with screaming, nagging, and chronic discomfort that you nonetheless want to spend more time with than you’re given.” Variety praises the “terrific cast,” but says “the ensemble’s crack comic timing can only go so far to compensate for uneven scripting,” and calls it “essentially just another movie about a thirtysomething guy unable to make a romantic commitment and grappling with the reasons why.”
Meanwhile, The New York Times slammed it, saying that the film, “an unfunny comedy about a guy mooning over his parents’ divorce decades later, is so eager to please it’s hard to hate. But it’s sluggish even at 87 minutes, clichéd and gives you nothing of interest to look at other than some familiar faces.” The Los Angeles Times calls it “regrettably forgettable” and refers to one scene “as ho-hum as the rest of the intended hilarity.”
