Star Wars 9 director's new movie The Book of Henry is getting panned

While ‘Star Wars IX’ director Colin Trevorrow might not have loads of movies in the can (just three, in fact), luckily they’ve all been critically acclaimed.

Until now.

The stunningly poor notices for his latest movie ‘The Book of Henry’ could well give Star Wars fans the jitters.

Starring Naomi Watts, child star du jour Jacob Tremblay, and ‘Midnight Special’ star Jaeden Lieberher, soon to star in the remake of ‘It’, it centres around Watts and her two sons living in a small suburban town.

When she finds a book penned by Henry (Liebeher) which describes how he would save the girl he loves from her abusive stepfather, she decides to take action.

But the results are not good, it would seem.

The Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw has hammered it with a scathing one-star, calling it ‘excruciatingly misjudged’.

“Combining improbable adventure caper, sickly bereavement drama and prurient child-abuse nightmare would present a tough tonal problem for any film-maker. It is certainly too tough for everyone involved here, and the film insidiously tries to use comedy as the general solvent, as if the periodic unfunny lines establish its general good faith and make sure we’re not too sad or too scared,” he writes.

He’s very much not alone in his disdain for the film, which also stars Sarah Silverman and ‘Breaking Bad’s Dean Norris.

Slant magazine calls it ‘Schmaltzy, manipulative, and tonally schizophrenic’, adding: “The Book of Henry is such a monumentally misguided venture that it ends up being oddly, if unintentionally, compelling.”

Variety hates it too, Owen Lieberman writing: “There’s the kind of bad movie that just sits there, unfolding with grimly predictable monotony. Then there’s the kind where the badness expands and metastasizes, taking on a jaw-dropping life of its own, pushing through to ever-higher levels of garishness.

“’The Book of Henry’, directed by Colin Trevorrow from Gregg Hurwitz’s script, is of the latter, you’ve-got-to-see-it-to-disbelieve-it variety.”

The Hollywood Reporter’s John DeFore calls it ‘a near catastrophe’.

“Trevorrow went out on some limbs also in his first feature, ‘Safety Not Guaranteed’,” he writes.

“There, though, he was making a Sundance-ready indie with actors who knew their way around the intersection of ironic quirks and real soul-searching. Here, the idiom of the wholesome family film makes no room for the cheap caper-flick stuff Hurwitz wants to sell us. And the compounding coincidences he requires in order to deliver a happy ending are almost disgustingly dishonest.”

Indiewire accuses it of having ‘the most ludicrous twist of the year’.

It’s not all bad news. Scott Menzel on a website called We Live Film loved it, saying that ‘Hollywood needs more films like this one. Films that aren’t afraid to take chances and challenge genre as well as audiences’. He is, however, in the stark minority.

It’s due out in the UK on June 23.

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