Review of O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000) by Hoops2448 — 29 Sep 2011

I don't like coming out of a viewing of a film and feeling like I enjoyed it but knowing something is missing. What makes my experience of O Brother worse is that I cannot figure out why I didn't like it as much as I should have.

The acting as always was stellar with George Clooney giving a performance that rivals some of his finest roles (Michael Clayton, Burn after Reading and Up in the Air) as Ulysses Everrett Mcgill a member of a chain gang who orchestrates a prison break so he can get back to his home town so he can regain some treasure in a valley due to be flooded. The Coen Brothers provide a great script that is even more quirky than some of there previous outings (The Hudsucker Proxy). The film pretty much has everything it needs to be a good Coen Brothers film with a great supporting cast including John Goodman and Holly Hunter, a great soundtrack and beautiful landscapes (even more so than True Grit).

However O Brother doesn't seem like an original thought (and I don't mean because it was loosely based on The Odyssey by Homer). It just seems like the Coen brothers have what they see as a working formula to there films and with this they just followed the recipe with it being very easy to compare the film to there others. Sure I liked the film but this may be the reason I didn't love it. Or perhaps I still haven't figured it out yet.