That doesn't mean I liked it, exactly, but I didn't want to beat myself about the head and shoulders for watching it.
See, there's this guy who's a real jerk, and he wins the Nobel Prize in chemistry, and then his son is kidnapped and held for ransom (the prize money, of course), and all manner of wacky hijinks ensue. It's a sort of light-hearted black comedy that opens grisly and then backs off on the adult content. There wasn't even that much swearing!
I really like many of the actors here (it's got quite a cast: Alan Rickman, Mary Steenburgen, Eliza Dushku, Danny DeVito, Bill Pullman, Ted Danson...), and there are some quite enjoyable performances and fun character moments.
The story really falls apart as it gets toward the end, though, as a situation that was sort of moderately believable becomes completely ridiculous, without being enough fun to make you overlook the rapidly compounding implausibility.
It's as if there was this character-development movie all about Alan Rickman's obnoxious genius character and how everyone hates him, and then there was this other brutal-action type movie with an improbably complex plot, and they go together a little unevenly.
But nice work by the actors, and I did find it mostly entertaining and not horrible.
I did not observe much in the way of library tie-ins, although one character does spend a lot of time working on his thesis in a bookstore/coffee shop, which is...not the same thing. OK, never mind.
The main health take-away for me was that cutting off someone's thumb is really gross. I'll be putting that tip to good use the next time I'm trying to decide whether or not to cut off someone's thumb.
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