REVIEW ROUNDUP: John Patrick Shanley's WILD MOUNTAIN THYME, Starring Jamie Dornan & Emily Blunt

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By: Dec. 10, 2020
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REVIEW ROUNDUP: John Patrick Shanley's WILD MOUNTAIN THYME, Starring Jamie Dornan & Emily Blunt

John Patrick Shanley's "Wild Mountain Thyme" will be available to stream starting Friday, December 11th.

Shanley, who created Pulitzer Prize winner "Doubt" and beloved rom com "Moonstruck," brings his sweeping romantic vision to Ireland with Wild Mountain Thyme, based on his play "Outside Mullingar." The headstrong farmer Rosemary Muldoon (Emily Blunt) has her heart set on winning her neighbor Anthony Reilly's (Jamie Dornan) love.

The reviews are in...


David Erlich, IndieWire: "This sometimes enchanting (but always demented) soda farl of banter and blarney couldn't be a broader caricature of Irish culture if it were written by the Keebler elves and directed by a pint of Guinness."

Lindsey Bahr, Associated Press: "The writing is wry and occasionally quite funny. It's not unsurprising that it made for a good play. But on film it moves at a languorous pace. Like its characters, it's not interested in getting anywhere anytime soon."

Chuck Bowen, Slant Magazine: "Dornan is a stiff whom Hamm immediately upstages, and this dynamic underscores why Wild Mountain Thyme is so tedious and unsatisfying: You're inadvertently compelled to fear for the heroine, who's settling-out of fear of the unknown, out of lack of self-confidence-for someone unworthy of her. And Shanley doesn't seem to share this fear. For him, complacency makes for a happy ending."

Katie Rife, A.V. Club: "There are bad movies, and then there are the mystifyingly bad ones. These are the films that are stuck in the narrative equivalent of the uncanny valley, offering mostly workable stories with a handful of elements that render them strange in a primal, impossible-to-articulate way."

Mick LaSalle, The San Francisco Chronicle: "Somehow, through a succession of OK and pretty good scenes, it achieves a feeling of magic about it, so that by the end we realize that, without knowing it, we've been guided in a particular direction and toward a certain feeling. That feeling is specific and hard to describe but has something to do with love, time and acceptance."

David Rooney; The Hollywood Reporter: "Shanley's 2014 play Outside Mullingar was a mellow charmer that returned with disarming sentimentality to territory not far from the writer's Oscar-winning screenplay for Moonstruck, demonstrating the same faith that true love will eventually surmount all obstacles. But the light touch, the structural economy and lyrical voice that buoyed the gentle four-character piece on stage become cloying and strained in this clumsy expansion."

Adrian Horton, The Guardian: "Unfortunately, Shanley's adaptation of his 2014 Broadway play Outside Mullingar has little to recommend besides some truly beautiful shots of Ireland's County Mayo - it's a visually verdant but emotionally flat film whose confusing friction between two miscast leads frustrates rather than engrosses."

Leah Greenblatt, Entertainment Weekly: "Dialect, it turns out, is not Wild Mountain Thyme's strong suit; even, perplexingly, for the actual Irish people in the cast. (Jamie Dornan, what do they have on you?) But it almost seems churlish to single out one aspect of the film for unreality, when the whole thing is essentially one Riverdancing leprechaun short of a fairy tale."

Richard Roeper, The Chicago Sun Times: "Written and directed by John Patrick Shanley ("Moonstruck") and based on Shanley's stage play "Outside Mullingar," this is an odd duck of a movie, set in present day but firmly rooted in a near-mythical, old-timey Ireland where everyone speaks as if they know they're characters in a fable and there's nothing they can do about it, so why not just embrace the utter Irish cliché-ness of it all, and how's about another pint and maybe a song?"

Michael Phillips, The Chicago Tribune: "'Wild Mountain Thyme' doesn't work."


Watch the trailer here:



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