Very very predictable, including the post credit scene !!!

So much average

Good story, Not enough for a whole film

This story has more twists and turns than a second-rate soap opera.

This film is a lovely, playful and thoughtful romp through the conflicting forces that make up our modern world.Disguised as a wacky comedy sketching a chiaroscuro of moral, economic and educational themes, the film begins in a charming idyllic intellectual landscape where people delight in epistemological, ethical and ontological questions. To hear unabashed philosophical dialogue and playful joking about classical ideas in such a popular medium as mainstream film is a rare delight, especially done as it is as an affectionate spoof of the sequestered world of academia.Having set the piece in this intellectual arena, to then pull the philosopher out of his element into a world of childhood fears, sensual promise and madcap amorality creates the tension necessary for drama to occur. And there is drama indeed, with sweetness, bitterness, tenderness and violence all stewed together to boil down to some fairly basic and perennial questions about human nature.

Bill Kincaid (Edward Norton) is a classics professor at Brown University. Bill's identical twin Brady is growing weed in Oklahoma. Local drug lord Pug Rothbaum (Richard Dreyfuss) is pressuring him to sell his business. Colleen is Brady's pregnant girlfriend (Melanie Lynskey). Daisy (Susan Sarandon) is their mother. Bill returns home after being told that Brady is killed. Brady isn't actually dead and he want Bill to be his decoy. Bill is unwilling until Brady's friend Janet (Keri Russell) shows up.Edward Norton does a relatively good job at the duo role acting. However the movie is not nearly good enough. It wants to be funny wacky caper but it never gets truly funny. There is a dark unlikeable edge to both characters. I actually dislike the professor character more the weed growing brother. Keri Russell has limited chemistry and the darker turns are done too carelessly by director/writer/actor Tim Blake Nelson.

Lines from Walt Whitman are interwoven with other theories of Creation, such as geometry and insects. Poetic lines written by Tim Blake Nelson, who also wrote, directed, played Bolger and produced an understated commentary on what might be updated Whitman. Ed Norton's characters remind me of Tom Hanks with a splash of Gomer Pyle, or Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde, but somehow it works, no character is all good, none all evil, man is complex.Filmed in Shreveport, Louisiana, you get interesting, ever-changing scenery, never predictable. In addition to Ed Norton, other name brand actors are Dryfuss, Sarandon, DeVito's daughter (who has his eyes) and Ty Burrell.Not at all like Cheech & Chong!

In spite of Edward Norton's overworked OK accent, he's a good enough actor to create two distinct characters-twins, one an ivy-league prof, the other a successful Okie pot grower. Everybody else rises to the occasion as well; even the script is good- it's the story that's the problem. If it's a comedy, it should stay a comedy IMHO, but this story, instead of developing a comedic premise into something that resolves in a comic fashion, depends on violent death to do that. So in its second half the story goes from building up a potentially hilarious situation into resolution by hollow-point ammunition. Much as did The Departed: Everybody shoots everybody else. The writer/director/actor, Tim Blake Nelson, got it off to a believable start, then seems to have thrown up his hands whenever the going got tricky, and just wiped out the troublesome characters. Deus ex machina lives, in the form of high-powered weaponry. I gave it a 5 because the acting (Edward Norton, T.B. Nelson, Keri Russell, Susan Sarandon) is first-rate. But the tone is completely inconsistent. I'm supposed to laugh at people getting their brains blown out? Maybe Nelson is trying to make a statement about "How we settle things down here in Oklahoma", or in The South, or in America? I don't know. It looks to me as if he just ran out of ideas.