Critics reviews

Anne Hathaway wears a beat-up jacket and bangs nearly down to her eyes. She's an inspiration to trashy women everywhere. Her character Gloria's a continuation of Kym from Rachel Getting Married, if a tad less toxic. She gets sloshed, stagnates, then falls under the thrall of an old hometown friend. He gives her things to assert his control. The two discover psychic ties to monsters half a world away, and this sci-fi metaphor renders questions of power larger than life.

All the narrative oxygen is gradually sucked up before – finally, frustratingly – Colossal reveals itself to be nothing more than a trite relationship drama. The monster movie conceit may prove an irresistible lure to some, but this is nowhere near as ambitious, funny or clever as it thinks it is.

Hathaway taps into the same bruised intensity she marshaled in Rachel Getting Married (2008), but Gloria's redemption narrative is over-cranked to the point of turning her into a literal action her, which has the strange effect of trivialising her triumph instead of enlarging it. Vigalondo is a talented filmmaker who can't quite reconcile his gifts as a light entertainer with the desire to give his movie some real emotional weight, As a result, Colossal ends up scoring a split decision.

Rare indeed is the premise so inspired that it's nearly impossible to screw up, but Colossal, the latest oddball effort from Spanish director Nacho Vigalondo (Timecrimes, Extraterrestrial), somehow mostly works despite being a complete mess.

Part of the film's unique sense of humor comes from the way it plays against our expectation that Vigalondo is going to make it bigger or more serious at some point. He never does. The film takes the characters' problems seriously, but it never becomes self-important... Hathaway is quite appealing here, striking just the right note between desperation and "whatever, dude" haplessness. Her performance has a Diane Keaton-ish quality.

The fantasy of "Colossal," Nacho Vigalondo's new genre mashup, starring Anne Hathaway, does two things well at the same time: it embodies a strong idea and it delivers aesthetic pleasure. At its best, it achieves a rare synthesis of virtues that is a primal value of the cinema: it revels in the power of cinematic artifice to tell a story that confronts big questions about real life. "Colossal" reaches that level only intermittently, but it's rare for any filmmaker to achieve it at all.

The movie is a persona-delivery system, a straightforward star vehicle in the guise of something weirder. Hathaway is the real asset, here, and Vigalondo's strength as a director is in allowing her to let the character breathe. Hathaway's performance embodies Gloria's humiliations and triumphs so fully, and loosely, and with such a "been there" vibe, that you feel the movie is as much about her as the woman she's playing.

Vigalondo's latest, Colossal, is his most ambitious yet. It features Anne Hathaway as a messed-up writer who heads back home to her small town, only to discover that she can control the movements of a giant kaiju that just happens to be terrorizing Seoul. In its irreverent mix of monster movie and rom-com, and its eagerness to then undercut both genres, the film is very much Vigalondo's work.

Part giant-monster movie, part romantic comedy, yet 100 percent original, Colossal marks a welcome return to form for Spanish director Nacho Vigalondo. It's the most satisfying and innovative film he's made since his 2007 feature debut, Timecrimes, which fuses a murder mystery with a time-traveling science-fiction tale... It's a wonderful twist on the genre, and a surprisingly touching take on female self-empowerment and overcoming one's worst addictions.

It never quite fulfills the promise of its setup; instead, Vigalondo seems to lose the thread of his characters, exuding more of an interest in manipulating them to conform to simplistic good-versus-evil binaries. And ultimately, there's something rather distasteful about a film that essentially shows the relatively trivial conflicts between two white American characters being played out on a destructive grand scale in a faraway Asian city (Seoul in this case).

It's metaphorically sound while making no literal sense. Which would be fine if Vigalondo were nimble enough a dramatist, or strong enough a director of actors, to effectively peddle his goofy wares. There are some true laughs, and its scenario plays as a good joke on big-budget motion-capture filmmaking, but the whole thing gets bogged down in clunky monologues, repetitive scenarios, and a performance of forced every-guy nonchalance by Jason Sudeikis that has to be seen to be disbelieved.

Vigalondo's tone winks more than plays things straight, thereby undermining his characters, the film's stakes, and any genuine emotion he might have been able to conjure up. The film is situated in a no man's land between Charlie Kaufman's poignancy-by-way-of-surreality and a distant, purely comedic approach. Despite its overcompensating title, Colossal is characterized by this quintessential lack.