(spoilers!)

Joy is simply and shortly disappointing. It’s always a problem if you have really high expectations for a movie, any movie, but how could you not with these names attached? With two movies as great as Silver Linings Playbook and American Hustle preceding them? But Joy never lives up to those energetic miracles and it’s hard to pin down what its problem is. It is incoherent in its mood, its message, its style. It wants too much and doesn’t know what it wants at the same time. Jennifer Lawrence is as amazing as she can be and even in bad movies I’d never get tired of watching her act. But this movie doesn’t work and it’s worse as failed potential than as an actual movie. Some of the acting by some actors is cringeworthy, the whole soap opera framing device is as dysfunctional as it is suddenly discarded and the structure of the script never achieves any kind of flow that this movie needs. The narration seems off, the ending is frustrating and Bradley Cooper’s role almost not necessary. Despite all of these (and many other) flaws, the movie is a collection of good parts that never add up. It’s one of the worst kinds of movies, the well-intended, ambitious mess that is worse because it could have been so good.