Colin Trevorrow’s ‘Book of Henry’ Is a ‘Dehumanizing Mess’ and 6 Other Rotten Reviews
Reviews for Colin Trevorrow’s “The Book of Henry” started pouring in on Wednesday, and boy, do critics slam the movie from the director of 2015’s much-loved “Jurassic World.”
Other critics called Trevorrow’s third feature “a manipulative exercise in emotional bullying” and a “dehumanizing mess.”
“The really sad thing is that this is a movie with some intriguing characters that has some real comic and dramatic potential, but all this gets lost in increasingly silly plot mechanics,” TheWrap’s film critic Dan Callahan wrote in his review.
“The Book of Henry” stars Naomi Watts, Jaeden Lieberher, Jacob Tremblay, Sarah Silverman and Dean Norris and follows a single mother who discovers a plot to rescue their next door neighbor from her abuse stepfather in a book her son Henry wrote.
[...] as a movie, the entire thing feels forced and hollow, less an authentic expression of the human experience and more a gee-whiz exercise in cleverness, slathered in a healthy coat of multiplex-friendly weirdness.
How was a movie about a precocious, 11-year-old who’s helping to raise his little brother and his immature mom also a film about the mom trying to assassinate their next-door neighbor because he’s molesting his stepdaughter?
[...] it is completely insane.
The plot proceeds from the charming to the manipulative to the shameless to the demented in gentle steps that may lull some audiences the way a frog can be boiled to death by degrees.