Sweet Home Alabama

Buena Vista Pictures | Release Date: September 27, 2002

CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION

45	METASCORE Mixed or average reviews based on 35 Critic Reviews

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Mixed:

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Critic Reviews

Critic score Publication By date

Roger Ebert

It is a fantasy, a sweet, light-hearted fairy tale with Reese Witherspoon at its center. She is as lovable as Doris Day would have been in this role (in fact, Doris Day was in this role, in "Please Don't Eat the Daisies"). Read full review

Jonathan Curiel

There's a certain formulaic and familiar quality about Sweet Home Alabama, but it doesn't matter. Read full review

Stephen Holden

If Sweet Home Alabama, directed by Andy Tennant from a screenplay by C. Jay Cox, has the ingredients for a classic screwball comedy, the movie is in such a rush to entertain that it barely connects the dots of its story. But it still has its effectively goofy comic moments. Read full review

James Berardinelli

Die-hard fans of Witherspoon and the romantic comedy genre will probably find enough to like in this film to make it worth a trip to the theater. Everyone else would be best served by spending their hard-earned money on something else. Read full review

Carrie Rickey

If you can tolerate the redneck-versus-blueblood cliches that the film trades in, Sweet Home Alabama is diverting in the manner of Jeff Foxworthy's stand-up act. Read full review

Jonathan Foreman

It's only when you're leaving the theater that her spell wears off and you realize just how bad the movie, directed by Andy Tennant, really is. Read full review

Desson Thomson

If you're a fan of Witherspoon, this movie was produced, shot, edited and distributed entirely for you. Read full review

Anthony Lane

Makes a suitable staging post in Witherspoon's headlong career. She may want to forget it by Christmas, yet its cushioned slackness allows her to sharpen her grasp of a steely American type: the girl next door who will kill to get out of town. [30 Sept 2002, p. 145]

Ann Hornaday

At the movie's thoroughly expected conclusion, a visual joke has a bedraggled cat licking at the icing on a wedding cake, but it's really Melanie who gets to have it and eat it, too.

William Arnold

Witherspoon shines. She's never looked better, and she carries herself with both her usual comedic flair and a surprising elegance. Read full review

David Sterritt

It doesn't have a speck of authentic heart -- you can bet its Hollywood creators wouldn't move to Alabama if their lives depended on it -- but if you belong to the growing legion of Witherspoon worshippers, this is definitely the movie of the week. Read full review

Liam Lacey

Light to the point of disposability, Sweet Home Alabama is a small screwball comic idea that spins out far too long. Read full review

Mike Clark

The latest picture to give you the sense that Hollywood filmmakers simply plucked another old pop-tune title ripe for ripping off, then were shaken by the rude reality of coming up with a script to jerry-build around it. Read full review

Kimberley Jones

What it needs is a little more dirtying down. What it needs, in short, is less New York, and more Alabama. Read full review

Ty Burr

Isn't just lame; it's neutered. Read full review

Joe Morgenstern

The whole dumb movie is a baloney cake, but the enticing icing on it is Reese Witherspoon, who manages to have a few moments of spontaneous fun in this half-baked store-bought comedy.

Lisa Schwarzbaum

Unbearable were Witherspoon not such a genuinely attractive performer. Read full review

J.R. Jones

This is the usual cartoon of hound dogs, roadhouses, antebellum mansions, and Civil War reenactments. Aside from that, it's not a bad date movie. Read full review

TV Guide MagazineMaitland McDonagh

Fluff in the tradition of Hollywood's screwball comedies of remarriage, lacking the wit or grace of such classics as "His Girl Friday" (1940) and "The Awful Truth" (1937). Read full review

Peter Travers

Witherspoon has the class, the sass and the full-out talent to sustain a major career. Who else could turn the wimpy Sweet Home Alabama into a date-movie winner? She's one of that select group who is worth watching in anything. Even in this less-than-magic kingdom, Reese rules. Read full review

Stephanie Zacharek

A good-natured but massively flawed little comedy. Read full review

Kim Morgan

Too sugary to be funny or offensive or even offensively funny, though any kind of funny would be welcome here.

Jack Mathews

Trying to resist Reese is like trying to resist Reese's Pieces: They're always the same but you can't help yourself. Read full review

Manohla Dargis

The South takes another beating in Sweet Home Alabama, but that's nothing compared with the one conferred on the sweetheart personality of its pint-sized Gen. Sherman. Read full review

Todd McCarthy

Revives the format but not the fun of classic Hollywood screwball comedies about rediscovering the virtues of a former mate. Read full review

Laura Sinagra

The clunky yee-haw script full of tired bitch/angel oppositions and Witherspoon's school-play petulance cranks the twang to a blare. Read full review

Scott Tobias

The film does coast along smoothly to the inevitable, which is a credit to the always-game Reese Witherspoon, who's courteous enough to pretend she doesn't know what's coming, then make it look like a huge surprise. Read full review

Rick Kisonak

Goes south early and its director never comes close to turning things around. Read full review

Richard Corliss

The film (directed by Andy Tennant) has more problems than Melanie, and they're insoluble. Its lazy calculation telegraphs each plot turn and underlines emotions with corn-pone music. Read full review

Lawrence Toppman

Speaking of sounding Southern, I have to admit that the accents didn't match, and half the actors couldn't even do accents. But since we all sound alike down here, that's no big deal. Read full review

Connie Ogle

A romantic comedy so rote, dull and predictable that it makes "You've Got Mail" seem innovative and fresh. Read full review

Michael Sragow

And Witherspoon? She does the American equivalent of a mechanical British performance: She hits every note too perfectly. There's no shadow to her smile. Read full review

Mark Caro

This movie is phony, phony, phony -- from its Disneyland version of the Deep South to its pious lessons about the values of simple rural living. Read full review

New Times (L.A.)Robert Wilonsky

Which leaves Witherspoon, that delicious pastry, to heave the movie on her small shoulders and carry it home. The load is light -- the movie weighs no more than a glass of flat champagne -- but even she can't withstand the burden.

Hazel-Dawn Dumpert

To call the film contrived would imply that some sort of effort had been made, when Sweet Home Alabama is nothing but dead lazy and slow — y'all. Read full review