Critics reviews

[It's] more fizzle than folly: Russell's wicked black-comic instincts occasionally poke through the gauzy confusion, but virtually every cue and every cut feels off by seconds. Whether the film was undone by other hands' Frankenstein-like tinkering, or whether it was a rare Russell misfire all along, we'll never know.

It is an awful piece of work; a demented, discombobulated non-film that's more fun to kvetch about than actually watch. To say it has been cobbled together would be an insult to cobblers. In fact, an actual cobbler could probably stitch together a better edit of the available material than the producers have managed here. It is a movie that needs be interred with as little fanfare as possible. A pauper's funeral is definitely on the cards.

Whoever wrangled this stuff in the editing suite clearly did everything they could to reassure viewers that what they were watching was definitely supposed to be funny. Given the film was never going to make sense, though, letting its flailing oddness flap free would have surely been the shrewder strategy.

[It] floats somewhere between a bad John Waters film and a neutered Farrelly brothers comedy... What exists here isn't a facsimile but a Frankenfilm.

From its intrusively generic soundtrack heavy on cheesy strings to the painfully frantic attempts at supposed funny business (consider that Paul Reubens aka Pee-Wee Herman provides probably the only well-modulated performance), "Accidental Love" could easily qualify for disaster relief.

Accidental Love is an utter mess... But what truly makes this film so curious is the way in which flashes of Russell's genius shine through the chaos. We already know his talent with actors; there are few surer routes to an Oscar nomination these days than a major part in a David O. Russell movie. But we sometimes forget just what an exciting shooter he is — how freewheeling his camera can be, how he can capture and enhance a scene's inherent energy with almost supernatural power.

Most of the problems with this movie could not have been fixed in post-production. Everyone keeps talking fast and doing wacky things, as if entropy were the same thing as wit, but all that activity, paired with the tin-eared, subtext-free dialogue, only feels manic, sometimes borderline hysterical.

As with any such A-list train wreck, you watch "Accidental Love" in a state of forensic investigation, foraging for clues as to what attracted so much talent to such a misbegotten enterprise in the first place. Probably Russell (who officially quit the film in 2010), a devotee of Hollywood's classic screwball comedies, was drawn in by the central idea of a small-town rube who manages to capture the national spotlight and turn big business/politics on its ear.

Accidental Love isn't very good—and might never have been very good, judging from the general air of desperation—but much of it is identifiably Russell's work, and its scattered best moments recall Huckabees' inspired loopiness.

Accidental Love is pointedly stupid and tone deaf. Beyond the occasional obligatory utterance of words like "healthcare" and "socialist" (the latter of which is used here, as it is in reality by the GOP, to characterize any political action that takes into account the concerns of the lower middle class), the film doesn't make any gestures that could draw blood. The set pieces are chummy and lifeless, reducing a potent satirical subject to a vague non-issue.