‘Away We Go’: Sexy and funny – or insufferable?

The latest film from Sam Mendes, Away We Go, is something of a departure for the British director, as he decamps from the disenchanted suburbs of American Beauty and Revolutionary Road and takes a blissfully happy couple across America as they search for a place to bring up the baby they're expecting.

Penned by voguish Hollywood couple Dave Eggers and Vendela Vida, Away We Go focuses on Burt (John Krasinski) and Verona (Maya Rudolph), an insurance salesman and a medical textbook illustrator, who travel through Arizona, Wisconsin, Colorado and Carolina, all the while discovering, from the old flames and friends they look up, how not to raise a child.

Anyone reading the full-page ads that have appeared in Britain in recent days would be forgiven for believing that Mendes, who won an Oscar for American Beauty, has pulled off this change of scenery with aplomb. "Laugh-out-loud funny... the best film we've seen this year," screamed one review plastered across the advertisement. "Sexy, sweet and sublimely funny," reads another.

The problem is that these recommendations are from Grazia and the News of the World, neither of them particularly known for their film coverage, while many of the top-drawer film critics have been far less kind.

Most seemed to think that the main couple were likeable enough, and Empire even said that Rudolph, a former Saturday Night Live star, was a knockout, whose performance was "low on words and high on meaning".

The problems, it seems, are that the film comes across as a little smug, and that the caricatured collection of supporting characters are, as Nigel Andrews of the Financial Times describes, "irritating beyond belief". These include Verona's Banshee-like former boss, Burt's indifferent hippy parents and a neo-feminist Earth mother (Maggie Gyllenhaal) who's still breast-feeding her four-year-old. She, Ryan Gilbey claims in the New Statesman, is "not so much a character as a list of traits despised by the screenwriters".

The twee acoustic soundtrack also annoyed critics. Gilbey wrote: "Anyone who thinks that a script this lacklustre could not be made any worse has underestimated Sam Mendes, who takes Away We Go to a new plane of awfulness by imposing on it a soundtrack of winsome acoustic numbers by Alexi Murdoch. As Verona and Burt cuddle at the roadside, exchanging sweet nothings over another of Murdoch's jangly compositions, it's impossible to escape the feeling that you're being sold 300 free minutes of airtime on your mobile network."

In America, A O Scott of the New York Times was equally unimpressed. He wrote that Mendes was "a literary tourist from Britain who has missed the point every time he has crossed the ocean", and that "the vague, secondhand ideas about the blight of the suburbs that sloshed around American Beauty and Revolutionary Road are now complemented by an equally incoherent set of notions about the open road, the pioneer spirit, the idealism of youth."

The film industry trade paper Variety was pithier, describing the film as "insufferable".

This may be a bad week for new movies, but last week was excellent. Film fans who can't face the Mendes movie might prefer to catch up with either Meryl Streep on Oscar-winning form in Julie & Julia, the well-received British film Fish Tank, or the Anna Wintour documentary The September Issue.

WHAT THE CRITICS ARE SAYING:

A O Scott, New York Times: To observe that they inhabit no recognisable American social reality is only to say that this is a film by Sam Mendes, a literary tourist from Britain who has missed the point every time he has crossed the ocean. The vague, second-hand ideas about the blight of the suburbs that sloshed around American Beauty and Revolutionary Road are now complemented by an equally incoherent set of notions about the open road, the pioneer spirit, the idealism of youth.

Ben Walters, Time Out: The film's laboured humour and self-satisfaction grate, as does its twee indie-acoustic soundtrack. That every supporting character is depicted as insufferable or pitiable or both would be bad enough; what's worse is that the couple discover nothing about themselves that wasn't obvious from the opening, unless you count the banal dictum that there's no place like home. (Verdict: two stars out of five)

Olly Richards, Empire: Happiness is a difficult narrative concept to maintain, being, by definition, free of dramatic incident, but the lead couple are so charismatically written and played that even an uneventful trip on a train becomes high comedy. This is not an 'important' film likely to receive the Oscar hype Mendes usually attracts (that seems to be much the point), but it's a charming look at one of today's best directors cheerfully cutting loose. (Verdict: four stars out of five)