Metacritic reviews

A caper film of such postmodernist pretense that it's almost a parody of itself.

There was a lot I liked in Cletis Tout, including the performances and the very audacity of details like the magic tricks and the carrier pigeons. But it seemed a shame that the writer and director, Chris Ver Wiel, took a perfectly sound story idea and complicated it into an exercise in style. Less is more.

Harmless, mildly enjoyable.

Writer-director Chris Ver Wiel stocks this diverting crime comedy with familar characters and formulas.

The yarn itself is a winning one.

Ladling in so much schmaltz that even his in-house critic says, ''This thing's worse than `Terms of Endearment.'''

Cletis Tout is both in love with and able to laugh at the conventions it adopts, which is exactly where it goes wrong. It's just a little too self-satisfied.

This mistaken-identity picture is so film-culture referential that the final product is a ghost.

Who is Cletis Tout? Who cares?

What should have been a smart, stylish crime caper that nourishes film buffs with its multiple cinema references feels more like force-feeding.