Nigel Andrews reviews I ♥ Huckabees :

Every artist is allowed a failure or two. The writer-director David O. Russell uses up his entire allowance with I ♥ Huckabees. A laboriously zany plot about two "existential detectives" sucks up half a dozen themes - environmentalism, protest politics, capitalism, religion, space, time - while spitting out fluff, paperclips and carpet tacks like a bad vacuum cleaner on a bad day.

Spanking the Monkey, Flirting with Disaster and Three Kings made us believe that Russell was infallible, a pope of antic comedy who delivered knee-slapping encyclicals about America at play, work, love, war. His style, all riffs and rubato, coaxed new rhythms from actors whose range we thought we knew (Ben Stiller, George Clooney). But even zaniness needs discipline. Laisser-faire comic brainstorming leaves a messed-about landscape, with audiences crowding up the evacuation route to saner states.