Great performances by Dreyfuss and Elfman make this movie work wonderfully and make you laugh so hard you think your going to cry. This film is put together in a way it's sure to make you laugh. Professor James Krippendorf (Richard Dreyfess) is a Professor of anthropology and also a widower. Down in depression he ends up using the universities grant money for his own personal use. Faced with either confessing and going to jail, or going on with his fairy tale tribe. He chooses to go on with his made up tribe the Shelmikedmu. Using his own 3 kids and back yard for filming. He comes up with the most unique tribe ever seen before. Also with the help of his over anxious colleague Veronica Macelli (Jenna Elfman) who wont leave him alone. He ends up going deeper and deeper into his fairytale tribe, and trying to keep up with his lie. They end up taking the tribe national.Dreyfus handles the comedy with aplomb as he has done before, with the help of a supportive cast. It was nice to see Phil Leeds one last time in a couple of very brief appearances in a crowd scene. He was one of those talented character actors who always added that bit of spice to a production. This movie is very well put together, and just so ridiculous you got to laugh. In the end you will wish you were Shelmikedmu too. It's definitely worth seeing.Overall rating: 7 out of 10.

Krippendorf's Tribe has achieved something special, an incredible balance of fun and smarts accessible to all.There's a bit of exaggeration that will hold the interest of those who want primal fun, but little enough as not to displease those who do not want to be submerged by unrealistic situations.The intelligent humor of the dialogs and scenario will easily enthused those who need smarts to appreciate a comedy, but not so much as to rebuff those who do not want to work their brains to laugh.The acting is without reproach, even if a few of the secondary characters are a bit caricatured. The photography, soundtrack, and editing are as perfect as they are invisible, yet remarkable. The story is without logical flaw.A must see, easily enjoyable by anyone.

This movie is supposed to be a comedy, but it comes across as being funny for the wrong reasons. The professor (Richard Dreyfuss) is supposed to be the "good guy", but what is he doing? He (a) misappropriates college funds, (b) tells a bold faced lie to cover up his misdeeds, (c) involves his children in the scam, (d) gets a woman drunk to have sex with her (that's rape as in sexual assault, in case you have forgotten) and winds up televising it to the public, (d) tries to get more money from the college via the same scam, and (e), once the truth is out in the open, is saved via a lie from his daughter. Those that are after the truth are portrayed as arrogant, unfair, and snobbish who "deserve" to be fooled. The fact that the professor is in the wrong seems to get lost in the shuffle, and if there's a moral to the movie it's "don't get caught".I do not recommend this movie, for the above reasons, for children.

It should be obvious from the outset that this is one of those one-joke movies that will struggle to stretch the laughs out to feature-length proportions. It has the same effect as watching one of those Saturday Night Live sketches that seem funny at first but get dragged out way past the point where the humor has been exhausted and what remains is a sense of embarrassment for the actors.The biggest problem is the huge suspension of disbelief required to accept – even at a basic, unrealistic level - the preposterous central idea. Although there have been real-life academic and journalistic shams, this film never pretends to be rooted in any kind of realism, but the material is so weak that even wringing slapstick out of it is a challenge, resulting in some kind of unfunny vacuum for the most part.It's a shame that all concerned didn't attempt to do anything a little more serious with it. Scattered here and there in the script are some telling comments on the clash of cultures and relative benefits and drawbacks of two types of civilization – the hurried lives of cosmopolitan America and the more basic, living-with-nature life in rural South America. Even those few scraps are a wealth of depth compared to the awfully shallow "Jungle 2 Jungle."The greatest mystery may be how such a quality cast was lured to such a substandard production. Dreyfuss does his best to carry the film – and this is a good exhibit for his merits as a comic actor, for few others could coax laughs out of such patchy material. Those around him do as well as can be expected, most notably some great lines from Phil Leeds in a cameo towards the end, which is one of the very few rewards for sticking with it to the closing credits.