Osmosis Jones, a gross-out (albeit PG-rated) comedy starring Bill Murray and directed by the Farrelly brothers, is a relatively small film that is nabbing the best reviews of Friday’s new fare. Jay Carr comments in the Boston Globe: “Osmosis Jones is a fresh breath of foul air. It’s the first computer-generated gross-out movie based on the human excretory system.” Joe Morgenstern in the Wall Street Journal writes: “Here’s a genuinely eccentric comedy … that explodes with funny ideas and expresses most of them in wildly original animation.” Roger Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times predicts that kids will love the “jokes about anatomical plumbing.” And for adults, he says, “there is the exuberance of the animation and the energy of the whole movie, which is just plain clever.” Not so, says Tom Maurstad in the Dallas Morning News, one of a handful of naysayers. Maurstad comments that the film seems “torn between trying to be a film for adults (clever satire) and a film for kids (lots of gross stuff). In trying to be both, it up ends being neither.”
