Mostly Funny, but a Little Slow and Weird

Rating: 7/10 (23 April 2017)

The Big Lebowski follows a man who, after being mistaken for a rich man with the same name, seeks vengeance against the people who mistook him and peed on his rug.
It's a weird concept, and that's where a lot of the comedy comes from. Most of the comedy here is pretty good, I found myself laughing a fair bit. A few jokes fall flat, and by the end the movie is just grasping at straws to get both a good ending and some good comedy in there, but as a whole it's a weirdly funny movie.
The writing is pretty good too. While it is, again, quite weird and unconventional, it was fun to watch the characters awkwardly live their uninteresting lives, meanwhile balancing the whole rug situation. And the characters were pretty well written too. They were consistent and, there's that word again, weird.
The Coen brothers have this way with their movies where they all tend to be quite unconventional and sometimes give off a bad vibe, like it's just too unconventional and thus sometimes hard to fully enjoy. Don't get me wrong I like their movies, they're just really different and not always in a good way, and The Big Lebowski is one of those movies.
Moreover, it could be a little slow from time to time. The plot made little progress throughout basically the entire thing, and all the characters really stayed in the same place right up to the end.
Overall The Big Lebowski is a good movie, but it's far from the classic people seem to think that it is. Sure, it's funny and mostly well written, but it's a little slow and overly weird, and not everything always works. In the end I'd still recommend it, but it's not as good as people seem to think it is. Not in my book, anyway.