Meh

Rating: 5/10 (30 March 2014)

If you go to see Bill Murray, Owen Wilson, Jeff Goldblum, Jude Law, Tilda Swinton, or Tom Wilkinson then you'll be disappointed. Their parts are something less than cameos and really don't give them an opportunity to do their thing.
What was great about The Life Aquatic was its spoof of Jacques Cousteau and his milieu, something specific and real to bounce the comedy off of. The Grand Budapest Hotel has no real-world anchor and thus it's just a silly farcical story. The self-important concierge, M. Gustave (Ralph Fiennes) takes himself, his position, and his hotel way too seriously. How much funnier it would have been had there been some real-world character to set Gustave against.
The film is set ambiguously in 1930s Europe, even the Nazi thugs are ambiguous; their SS insignia looks like the scribble of a lazy physics professor. The special effects are period too. There's a chase scene on skis and sled that is ridiculously low-tech. How much funnier it would have been if there was something real world to measure it against like Cousteau's 1970s seat-of-the-pants, do-it-yourself science in the hands of Bill Murray.
Then there is the fictional bakery, Mendl's, whose cakes and confections try to be funny, but suffer from the same lack of a real-world counterpoint. It just doesn't carry the comic weight of Bill Murray's ship the Belafonte in Life Aquatic because there is no Calypso to measure it against. For those of you who don't know, Calypso was Cousteau's real-world research vessel. The comic jolt comes when you realize that Harry Belafonte was a famous calypso singer back then. It's brilliant little details like that, that made me roar at Life Aquatic but that are sorely lacking in Budapest.