‘Swiss Army Man’ is mincingly cute and achingly dull
Repulsive and boring, “Swiss Army Man” is one of the longest movies of the year, and it runs only 95 minutes.
Imagine a remake of “Castaway,” but with Wilson replaced by a rotting, flatulent corpse, or “Weekend at Bernie’s,” only with artistic pretensions in place of laughs.
The gimmick is that Paul Dano is on a desert island, driven to the point of suicide, when a dead body washes up on the shore.
[...] he starts imagining that the corpse, like a Swiss Army knife, can perform a variety of functions.
To keep things going — or really just to stretch this achingly dull, eventless and mincingly cute film to feature length — filmmakers Daniel Scheinert and Daniel Kwan offer musical sequences, featuring either bad pop music or soaring choruses trying to harmonize meaning into emptiness.
By the end, having failed in its attempt at cleverness, the movie veers into sentiment, the inevitable last resort.