Absolutely Fantastic

A Masterpiece!

When a movie has you begging for it to end not even half way through it's pure crap. We've all seen this movie and this characters millions of times, nothing new in it. Don't waste your time.

One of the most extraordinary films you will see this year. Take that as you want.

A young couple has a chance to move into a gorgeous duplex in the perfect New York neighborhood. All they have to do is bump off the current tenant, a cute little old lady.I feel like there was potential here but it never quite reached the full level. The concept is perfect for a dark comedy, and Danny DeVito is the right guy to bring such a script to fruition. But the lead actors were just not right. Ben Stiller has a few good comedies, but mostly duds. He was not able to bring his A-game. And Drew Barrymore was just bad through and through.There is one aspect about the film I liked: the suggestion that the old woman was immortal or possibly the devil herself. These ideas are only hinted out, but I thought it was quite clever to drop those hints in there...

This is a slapstick comedy starring Ben Stiller as Alex Rose and Drew Barrymoore as Nancy Kendricks. They play a young couple who had just moved into a duplex in Brooklyn - a home of their dreams. However, the elderly Mrs. Connelly (Eileen Essell) lives upstairs and won't move out, despite Alex and Nancy desperately trying to convince her to leave. Soon, Mrs. Connelly makes life miserable for them.The script of the movie seems funny, but the movie is filmed in a way that you really end up feeling sorry for Alex and Nancy and having hostility towards Mrs. Connelly. Though supposed to be a nice little old lady, she was portrayed in a way that generated no audience sympathy (at least for me). She was an annoying and conniving little witch, and despicable, too, were all those characters who stood on her side. Also, the ending sucked, adding salt to the wound.The acting was OK, but didn't make up for the otherwise forgettable movie.Grade D-

This geriatric variation of Home Alone, with more of a dash of The Ladykillers and an obscure French film called Tatie Danielle thrown in, is given a cartoonish presentation as the new owners of a Brooklyn duplex deal with the outwardly sweet upstairs tenant they can't evict. A series of juvenile visual gags are shot out like machine gun bullets, with the seemingly sweet old Irish doll tossing out insults at the couple with passive aggressive glee. Seemingly immortal, the old buzzard becomes the road-runner like target of the couple's coyote where you begin to hope that for once the coyotes will kill their target. This leaves the viewer with a slight guilt complex which reflects on the general mean-spiritedness of the script.Hysterically funny much of the time, this can't escape the fact that its laughs come from that part of the human soul that hates humanity. The young couple are in a no-win situation and the genuinely evil hag has them by the scrotum. The attempted murder sequences are sometimes uncomfortable to watch, even though the first part of the film makes you want to see them succeed. I would have liked to had a different leading man as I never have seen the appeal of Ben Stiller, but found no fault with Drew Barrymore, once again truly likable. As the old lady, Eileen Essell takes the role and runs with it, being alternately a combination of Old Mother Hubbard and the tenant of a gingerbread house. A perfect supporting cast (including raspy Harvey Fierstein as a shady real estate agent, Wallace Shawn as Barrymore's irascible boss and Swoozie Kurtz as Stiller's publisher) helps the surprising twists and turns which alternately hurt the stomach from laughing too much and the guilt which goes along with it.

Ben Stiller and Drew Barrymore make such a good looking couple in "Duplex".Danny Devito also directs the film and adds so much humor and energy into the film that will have you laughing on your sides.My friend gave me 2 choices between watching this movie and "The Hot Chick".He told me that "The Hot Chick" was really funny but he also told me that "Duplex" was also really funny.So I told him "Duplex" and I have to say that I was quite surprised at how funny and entertaining this movie was.The performances by Stiller and Barrymore were simply wonderful and I'm glad that Mr. Devito chose these 2 brilliant actors and put them in such delightful roles.There's also Eilleen Essell's performance, who plays the elderly person who ruins Stiller's and Barrymore's lives when they movie into a big house and have to share it with her.Although she did actually do some things to the couple that actually got me mad, I really thought that she was just a sweet person who obviously needed a lot of help around her house.I also need to mention that I think that this film is very underrated.How can something like this get a 5.7? It's not brilliant, but it's definitely not bad by any standards.As I always say, just watch the movie and just enjoy it for what it is.You actually may be surprised like I was.