page_title: A Simple Plan (film)
section_title: Critical response
hierarchical_section_title: A Simple Plan (film) / Reception / Critical response
caption_attribution_description: English: Billy Bob Thornton at a ceremony for America to receive a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
context_page_description: A Simple Plan is a 1998 neo-noir crime thriller film directed by Sam Raimi and written by Scott B. Smith, based on Smith's 1993 novel of the same name. The film stars Bill Paxton, Billy Bob Thornton, and Bridget Fonda. Set in rural Minnesota, the story follows brothers Hank and Jacob Mitchell, who, along with Jacob's friend Lou, discover a crashed plane containing $4.4 million in cash. The three men and Hank's wife Sarah go to great lengths to keep the money a secret but begin to doubt each other's trust, resulting in lies, deceit and murder.
  Development of the film began in 1993 before the novel was published. Mike Nichols purchased the film rights, and the project was picked up by Savoy Pictures. After Nichols stepped down, the film adaptation became mired in development hell, with Ben Stiller and John Dahl turning down opportunities to direct it. After Savoy closed in November 1997, the project was sold to Paramount Pictures. John Boorman was hired to direct, but scheduling conflicts led to his replacement by Raimi.
context_section_description: Review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes sampled 71 reviews, and gave the film a "Certified Fresh" score of 90%, with an average score of 8.23/10. The website's consensus calls the film "A riveting crime thriller full of emotional tension." Another review aggregator, Metacritic, assigned the film a weighted average score of 82 out of 100, based on 28 reviews from mainstream critics, indicating "universal acclaim".
  Reviewing the film during the Toronto International Film Festival, Glen Lovell of Variety, compared it to Fargo (1996), writing, "The key differences are in emphasis and tone: Fargo is deadpan noir; A Simple Plan...is a more robust Midwestern Gothic that owes as much to Poe as Chandler." In an "early review" of the film prior to its limited release, Roger Ebert and his colleague, Gene Siskel, gave the film a "Two Thumbs Up" rating on their syndicated television program Siskel and Ebert at the Movies. In a later episode, Ebert ranked A Simple Plan at number four on his list of the "Best Films of 1998". Siskel, writing for the Chicago Tribune, said that the film was "an exceedingly well-directed genre picture by [Raimi] ... [who] does an excellent job of presaging the lethal violence that follows. From his very first images we know that bodies are going to start to pile up."
  Online film critic James Berardinelli praised the acting, but commended Thornton's performance as being "the most striking that A Simple Plan has to offer." After Paxton's death in February 2017, Matt Zoller Seitz of RogerEbert.com cited the actor's performance as Hank to be the best in his career, stating that "The film might constitute Paxton's most sorrowful performance as well as his most frightening ... an outwardly ordinary man who has no idea what kind of evil he's capable of."
  Owen Gleiberman of Entertainment Weekly described the film as being "lean, elegant, and emotionally complex – a marvel of backwoods classicism". Janet Maslin of The New York Times called it a "quietly devastating thriller directed by [Raimi] ... who makes a flawless segue into mainstream storytelling." Edward Guthmann of the San Francisco Chronicle wrote, " ... for Raimi, whose mastery of visual effects has driven all of his previous films, A Simple Plan marks a tremendously successful break from the past. He's drawn lovely, complex performances from Paxton and Thornton and proven that he can work effectively – and movingly – in a minor emotional key."
  In a negative review, Richard Schickel of Time stated, "There's neither intricacy nor surprise in the narrative, and these dopes are tedious, witless company." Schlomo Schwartzberg of Boxoffice felt that the film "clutters up the story with unnecessary acts of violence and murder, and mainly stays on the surface, offering little more than cheap jolts of melodrama."
caption: Billy Bob Thornton was critically lauded for his performance as Jacob Mitchell, which earned him an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor.
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