User Reviews

There's really no way so screw it, I'll be blunt. ONLY a female writer/director would consider it a satisfying story where on top of being shamelessly unfaithful, kicking around her husband, and behaving like a spoiled, entitled brat for the majority of the film, not only fails to redeem herself or receive any kind of come-uppance for being such a bitch, but is rewarded by her husband who simply gives her what we just watched him spend the entire movie working to acquire. WHO DOES THAT??? I literally came away from this wondering if emasculation was an intentional theme here. It's like watching this man get kicked in the balls for an hour and a half just to pull himself together (apparently by losing his gut and getting a haircut), give farewell hugs and kisses to all the ball-kickers and we're supposed to applaud this as his triumph.

I spent the whole movie saying to myself "I know a woman wrote this... I know a woman wrote this..." I came on IMDb to check it out and guess what. Wrote AND co-directed! Not that there aren't female writers & directors who are excellent at what they do. Not that a female writer/director is obliged to write "for" a male audience. Not even that a female writer/director can't bring feminist sensibilities to her work. But was the writer/director here really so pro-female (or anti-male) that the main character isn't even allowed to give his cheating wife the telling-off and/or retribution that she'd been begging for the whole film? Am I the only one who feels this way? Or maybe I'm missing the point. If I am, maybe someone could help me understand. Because I can't imagine any man who would think this "works". And I can think of quite a few women who would agree.

This movie is like someone standing on a beach watching a man drown 6 feet from shore where, instead of throwing the drowning man a life preserver, the sadistic watcher throws him a series of concrete blocks. Aaron Eckhart is the drowning man, desperately trying to save himself and this film, while the insipid script and lifeless direction of Meet Bill keep dragging him down.

Bill (Aaron Eckhart) is less a character and more a collection of characteristics. He's got a pot belly and a bad haircut. He has his job only because he married his boss' daughter, even though his boss treats him more like an intern than an executive. He's got a gay brother and a serious candy addiction. I guess this mix of common and quirky traits is supposed to make the audience empathize and identify with Bill, but he's really just an annoying and self-pitying shmuck.

Bill is unhappy with his life and dreams of trading in his job at his father-in-law's bank for running his own doughnut shop. Then, two things happen. First, Bill is roped into being a mentor to a high school kid (Logan Lerman). Second, Bill finds out his wife Jessica (Elizabeth Banks) is cheating on him.

Let me digress for a moment. The high school kid in Bill doesn't have a name and is, in fact, listed in the credits only as "The Kid". If you ever write a screenplay, on behalf of everyone who might ever read it, I beg you to please, please, please give all of your characters actual names. You might think it's cute and clever to have one just be called "The Kid" or something, but it's not. It's stupid and aggravating. People, whether close friends or relative strangers, call each other by their names all the time and it's both very noticeable and irritating when a script goes out of its way to avoid that. I don't care if you think the character being nameless has some thematic significance. It's just dumb.

Returning to the movie, Bill freaks out when he discovers Jessica is sleeping with a cheesy local news anchor. He beats the guy up and gets thrown in jail. Bill also moves out of his own huge house and into his gay brother's equally huge home. He hangs out with The Kid, who tries to help Bill loosen up and enjoy life. Bill also takes up swimming and keeps trying to finagle his way into owning that doughnut shop. There's also a sex tape, a big party where everything goes wrong and a pointless subplot where The Kid keeps hitting on this lingerie store clerk (Jessica Alba). Not that hitting on Jessica Alba is pointless, but it serves absolutely no purpose in the story.

The things that happen in this movie either don't make sense or you don't care about them if they do. How does a dorky loser like Bill end up with a woman who looks like the incredibly appealing Elizabeth Banks? There's no explanation of what Jessica could have ever seen in him. Bill obviously gets paid a lot of money for very little work, has a huge house and a smokin' hot wife…and we're supposed to care that he's not satisfied with all that? When we find out Jessica is cheating on Bill, there's no emotional impact to it because if you were married to a pathetic non-entity like Bill, you'd probably cheat on him too. There's absolutely no reason or explanation for why The Kid makes such enormous efforts to attach himself to Bill and try and help him out, like an overexcited hybrid of Ferris Bueller and Jiminy Cricket, and The Kid is so theatrically irreverent that you just want Bill to smack him. The story also connects Bill's growth as a human being to him shaving off his body hair, which is just odd.

This movie is completely uninvolving, even though Aaron Eckhart is working as hard in this film as I've ever seen any performer work in anything. He does everything but drop trou and show us his Little Eckhart to make us laugh or feel ANYTHING about Bill. All of his efforts, however, are smothered by the relentlessly limp work of these filmmakers.

Unless you enjoy watching a drowning man being thrown cement blocks, there's nothing in Meet Bill for anyone to enjoy.

This comedy opened in about 36 theatres in April 2008, across the US played for 2 weeks with low box results. Truthfully it may have been better if they released it directly to DVD.

It stars Aaron Eckhart who is usually very good in the roles he takes,sorry to say he made an error with this movie.

The other players come off somewhat better, Elizabeth Banks & Jessica Alba are quite good in there parts.

The entire movie is saved from utter chaos by 2 things.

First thing is delightful performance by 15 year old newcomer Logan Lerman, He is the bright lad Eckhart is mentoring. He may have a good future.

The other saving grace are the 2 gay characters, for a welcome change they are not stereotypes. My personal feeling I would love to see an entire film featuring these 2 actors,they only are in a few short scenes but they and The young lad save this silly comedy from being an utter bomb.

Ratings: **1/2 (out of 4) 67 points(out of 100) IMDb 6 (out of 10)

This is a great Saturday night film. It borders somewhere between comedy and dramedy in that the topic veers often towards the all-too-serious before falling back into the comical.

Aaron Eckhart plays 'Bill'. Bill married the bank executive's daughter. Bill has it all but doesn't have much respect from his wife's family. His in-laws basically think of him as a peon. When Bill's wife cheats on him, things get a little rough. I have to give the writer and director kudos for not driving the film into the conventional 'another shot at life' take here i.e. character falls to the bottom, builds himself up by cutting off all ties.

He does build himself back up, but the pacing is subtle, real, human. Life is life, right, and Bill manages to pull himself together without making big dramatic scenes (a la Jerry Maguire) or bringing us some touching, knee-jerk morals and last minute epiphanies. He stumbles, breaks down and when you figure he'll win the girl in the end, he just wins himself.

The 'Kid' here is fun, Bill learns a lot from him but again, no morals, no 'kid knows best' B.S. here. The film dodges a few of the main clichés we see in most movies.

I thoroughly enjoyed this film. It isn't meant to be serious and it could have been. The writing is fun, the directing is fun, the characters are fun. What's wrong with fun?

Aaron Eckhart's performance is the only thing that kept this film intact until the end. He plays Bill, a down-and-out 30 something guy who works for the father of his wife. He reluctantly takes a kid under his wing and be his mentor.

He was supposed to teach the kid about life and all that comes along with it, instead the kid taught Bill that life is more than a good desk job and a bar of Snickers.

A solid performance by Aaron Eckhart. He was funny, outrageous, comedic, unbelievable, awkward, silly whatever you call him, he was pretty impressive.

I don't know about the remaining actors though. Jessica Alba barely spoke in the entire film and her role was downright useless. Its a damn shame.

6/10

I thought this movie was utterly terrible. It was completely unoriginal and there were so many superfluous characters and scenes that is was just ridiculous. What as the Jessica Alba character supposed to be? What was she supposed to add? The Kid character was pretty pointless also. There was an endless series of scenes that, I assume, were supposed to be funny, but added nothing to the narrative. There is this whole subplot where we are supposed to imagine that the Kid and Alba might have some romantic chemistry, but it is just ludicrous. Also, one of the major plot points is Bill trying to win back his wife. However, we never get a sense of why he would want to do this. After all, she is uniformly terrible to him throughout the movie, and he doesn't seem that into her, until it's convenient for the plot. If they had taken out some of the more pointless scenes (especially the one with the Kid dancing around in women's underwear--what was that about?), and spent more time exploring the relationship between the two leads, then it might have made more sense. Aaron Eckhart is a very talented actor, and did the best with the story he had. However, there was no saving this train wreck. I would say that it would benefit from better editing, but in all honesty, it would have to be edited to the point of non-existence to be improved. Largely, this movie seemed like a low-rent, cheap rehash of some of the themes from American Beauty, without any of the depth, humour, or intelligence. They had the repressed husband attempting to break free, the bitchy adulterous wife, and drug dealing rebellious teenage boy. What a waste of time, and in Eckhart's case, talent.

This is a bad movie. why ?

1. Plot makes no sense. (where are the kid's parents? Why did Bill shave himself?)

2. Horribly horribly uncomfortable to watch. (Bill and the kid entertain two babes in a tent. And we are led to believe that there is sex involved, and the next morning the kid is there in his underwear. So, they had an orgy ? A 40 year old, 15 year old kid and two babes ? Yuk.)

3. The dialogue is cringe inducing (Kid: You suck. Bill: You suck. Lucy: You both suck. Me: Facepalm)

Skip this one.

Aaron Eckhart is Bill, a guy with some problems who is lost within a life the chose him rather than him choosing it for himself. He's tired of not doing what he wishes to do. He wants change and finally gets around to it in this film.

With Jessica Alba & Elizabeth Banks, this is a pleasant film with some light hearted moments. Trouble is is never rises much above a certain level which is a middle of the road effort by the film makers. No scenes are memorable enough to really latch on to the viewer in this one.

We are all left with a feel good ending where meeting Bill and seeing that he is finally headed in the direction he wants to go is OK. There is nothing in the story that makes you wish to go any more into it. At least the film is pretty short as length would not help this.

This movie is OK but nothing to write home about.

Reading the reviews here on IMDb, it looks like a lot of the reviews are positive, which is leaving me scratching my head. The critics panned the film, and while I don't always agree with them this time I have to say I agree. What I don't get is that I don't see any of the comments I would have expected to see. Case in point, there are several scenes with Bill (a 40 year old man) smoking pot and drinking with his teenage mentee. There's even a scene that implies that Bill and the kid got it on with a couple of girls in a tent together. In the film, this is passed off as no big deal, but watching it I was cringing. I guess I'm just surprised. I don't consider myself to be that much of a prude, but it just felt wrong. Maybe I'm out of touch.

Anyways, the film never hits the right notes, and despite a decent cast the actors all feel as if they are auditioning for different films. Bill seems to be in American Beauty, his mentee seems like he thinks he's in a national lampoon film, the wife in a dramedy, and Jessica Alba seems like she can't wait to leave the scene and hop on the first flight out of town. Apart from Bill, none of the characters are fleshed out even a little. This is particularly true for Bill's gay brother, who's only role seems to be to pick him up from jail and look concerned while Bill rants. According to the notes on the film there were a lot of last minute cast changes and, I'm guessing, script changes to accommodate the different actors. Whatever was done, the whole thing feels like it unraveled in a spectacularly bad way. I can't get the hour and a half of my life back, but its not too late for you. Save yourself and avoid this flick.