Director Marc Forster's comedy-drama "A Man Called Otto" is the first English adaptation (there was a Swedish one in 2015) of Fredrick Backman's novel "A Man Called Ove."
Tom Hanks stars as Otto Anderson, a suburban Pittsburgh resident who decides to end his life after losing his wife Sonya. While Otto is a grumpy and tough-looking man, his life begins to change after he meets his new neighbors, a family with two young children.
Also starring Mariana Treviño, Mike Birbiglia and others, is Hanks's portrayal of a grumpy man who turns his life around worth your time in the cinema, or should you wait for it get on a streaming site? Here's what the reviews say.
What It's About
Adding to the pile of ham-fisted and unnecessary American remakes of successful international films, “A Man Called Otto” squeezes every drop of spontaneity and charm out of its generally well-liked source material. A remake of the 2016 Swedish comedy “A Man Called Ove,” based on Swedish writer Fredrik Backman’s 2012 bestseller, “A Man Called Otto” Americanizes the story of a grumpy old man healed by a boisterous immigrant family next door. While “Otto” may reach fresh audiences who’d otherwise balk at subtitles, this sluggish rendition is unlikely to inspire anyone to seek out the original.
As was the case in “Ove,” Otto can’t wait to join his wife on the other side, but his frequent suicide attempts get interrupted in episodes that are sometimes awkwardly funny, and other times, just plain awkward. The chief interrupters of our get-off-my-lawn guy are the abovementioned new neighbors: the happily married-with-kids couple Marisol (a bubbly and scene-stealing Mariana Treviño, the absolute best thing about the film) and Tommy (Manuel Garcia-Ruflo), who often ask little favors from the grumpy Otto. There are also others in the neighborhood, like a kindly transgender teenager Malcolm (Mack Bayda) thrown out of his house by his dad, the fitness-obsessed Jimmy (Cameron Britton), Otto’s old friend Rueben (Peter Lawson Jones), and his wife Anita (Juanita Jennings), who are no longer on cordial terms with Otto. And let’s not forget a stray cat that no one seems to know what to do with for a while.
The Script Could've Been Better
The storyline’s less convincing elements include Otto becoming a social media sensation after he’s filmed rescuing an elderly man who’s fallen onto train tracks. That allows him to exploit his newfound fame when the real estate company attempts to evict his longtime neighbors after they experience major health issues. It’s the sort of melodramatic plot contrivance that feels wholly unnecessary, as if screenwriter David Magee didn’t trust that the story of a grief-stricken man regaining his will to live would carry enough emotional weight.
[THR]
Usually U.S. remakes of foreign films tend to homogenize the source material. But “A Man Called Otto” is not only more bloated than the Swedish film, it’s more outré, in a way that’s hard to pin down.
[NYT]
Tom Hanks Just Doesn't Fit The Role
Hanks’s performance amplifies and colourises the original curmudgeon, and his star-quality soups up the drama and makes a clearer sense of the backstory, yet the very fact of it being Hanks means that we never for a moment believe that he really is going to be that nasty (or that unhappy) for long.
The wonderful Treviño never cedes a scene to Hanks out of respect or fear. That she’s able to prop the film up on her formidable shoulders is even more remarkable considering that "A Man Called Otto" marks one of the least effective uses of Hanks’ talent.
[AV Club]
TL;DR
The film is so toothless that its protagonist is ultimately about as forbidding as a warm hug.
[Slant]
“A Man Called Otto” wants to lift our spirits, but the trouble with it is that the nicer Otto gets, the more naggingly fake the movie becomes. It should have been called “Florid-est Grump.”
[Variety]
Less feel-good, more feel-nothing.
[Mashable]
