James L. Brooks has had a celebrated career, co-creating classic series including The Simpsons and directing movies like As Good as It Gets and Terms of Endearment, which won him an Academy Award for Best Director. Unfortunately, it doesn’t look like they can all be great. Ella McCay is the latest project from Brooks, hitting the 2025 movie calendar on December 12. Critics have seen the political dramedy, and their reviews are pretty harsh, calling the movie “borderline abysmal” and a “sloppy slog.”
Ella McCay is set in 2008 and stars Sex Education’s Emma Mackey as the title character who suddenly is appointed governor. As she navigates her new position, she faces challenges including a potential scandal and accidentally getting high on her brother’s edibles. Playing on one of the director’s hits, Nick Schager of the Daily Beast calls it “as bad as it gets,” and, according to Schager, that may be wittier than anything he saw in Ella McCay, which is lacking charm but full of generic, hokey idealism. He continues:
It’s a borderline-abysmal return engagement, so across-the-board affected that it feels less like a classic Brooks effort than someone doing their best Brooks impersonation. With its phoniness epitomized by Emma Mackey’s lead turn, it’s the biggest dud of the artist’s career, and the holiday season’s most egregious misfire.
Johnny Oleksinski of the New York Post jests, “My kingdom for a Spanglish!” as he rates Ella McCay 1 out of 4 stars, calling it “cheesy and interminable.” It’s depressing, Oleksinski writes, that such a talented director could give us something so “cloying and empty-headed.” He continues:
I hoped Brooks, who I greatly admire, would deliver a pleasantly old-fashioned comedy coursing with intellect and textured performances. D’oh! This sloppy slog is terrible; short, but interminable. The characters? Unserious, unconvincing cartoons. Except Homer Simpson is a pillar of nuance next to most of the sputtering fools of Ella McCay.
David Rooney of THR says he possibly speaks for most critics when he acknowledges how painful it is to lambaste the work of such a beloved titan of the entertainment industry. His hope is that Ella McCay is quickly forgotten in order to avoid tarnishing James L. Brooks’ legacy. Rooney writes:
Press materials state that Ella McCay was made as a tribute to 1950s screwball comedies, ‘punctuated by moments of drama in pursuit of truth telling.’ Sure, Jan. When the results are this feeble, it’s probably best to keep quiet about auteurist intent. The movie is antiquated sitcom, very much in an ‘80s vein, its veneer of schmaltz garnished with a tinkling score by Hans Zimmer that should come with a sugar-content warning.
Courtney Small of Exclaim! says Ella McCay is drunk on nostalgia, stumbling across numerous conflicts but failing to explore any of them. According to the critic, the movie “preaches the importance of finding the strength to have honest and healing conversations, but has nothing of note to say.” Small continues:
Everyone in Ella McCay appears to have lived in a bubble that the realities of the world never truly touch. For all the scandals in the film — ranging from adultery to extortion — the consequences never feel that dire or life-altering. Even Ella sees her approval rating take an uptick after the media nicknames her ‘Little Miss Nooner’ after they expose her lunchtime trysts. The safe and cutesy nature of the film wouldn't be so jarring if Brooks just explored one plot with a smidgen of depth.
Meanwhile, some critics are able to find the James L. Brooks charm. Pete Hammond of Deadline hopes that audiences will give this unassuming and all-too-rare throwback comedy a chance. The director has once again created a richly interesting and conflicted woman, and the critic thinks audiences will see a star being born in Emma Mackey’s performance. Hammond continues:
Brooks juggles tone here between the spirit of screwball comedy inspired by films of the 1940s and ’50s mixed with strong character development and more serious undertones. What he has is essentially a textbook kind of female lead who is challenged by the men in her life, in this case an errant father, needy brother, duplicitous husband and a good man in Governor Bill, who in the end is really only supporting advancing her as a means to his own political ladder climb. No wonder she seems so disheveled.
While some are finding the good in the classic filmmaker’s first movie in 15 years, the majority seem to have trouble getting past a tonal imbalance, an outdated sense of idealism and nostalgia for 2008-era politics. It currently holds a 22% on Rotten Tomatoes from 45 reviews.
However, if this sounds like the boost your holiday needs, and you want to see Emma Mackey tackle the gubernatorial world, Ella McCay arrives in theaters on Friday, December 12.
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