Inspired by the linked XKCD. Using 60% instead of 50% because that’s an easy filter to apply on rottentomatoes.
I’ll go first: I think “Sherlock Holmes: A game of Shadows” was awesome, from the plot to the characters ,and especially how they used screen-play to highlight how Sherlocks head works in these absurd ways.
I find imbd more reliable in a way than RT. If you view the 10 to 1 rating system as a percentage chance of you enjoying a movie, then it’s extremely trustworthy. Letterbox is pretty good as well.
Kung Pow only has a 13% critic rating and I love that movie. 69% audience score though so that might disqualify it.
I remember quite liking Slackers when I saw it (haven’t rewatched it though, so my opinion might have changed). I think if this movie every time I hear the song “She’ll be comin’ 'round the mountain”.
The Big Hit
Movies I saw 20 years ago it seems when maybe my tastes (and me too let’s face it) were a little immature. Still love Kung Pow though
I think it’s difficult for most comedy to stand the test of time(not all obviously). I went back and watched Bo Burnham’s older work after watching Inside. At the time, that stuff was hilarious, but now it makes me cringe hard.
This is unfortunately an accurate description of that movie.
Think of something like Airplane! or Ghostbusters. There are so many memorable and/or silly parts and lines that people remember well and will repeat over and over. But of course, each also has a real movie to go along with it.
All the clips and lines and other zany parts of Kung Pow can be hilarious, but the movie itself is pretty bad.
The scene with the wounds on his hands, something like:
“does it hurt?”
“Not really”
Pours salt in wounds “Does it now?”
“No”
Breaks thermometer into the wounds “how about now?”
“A little”
“Aww! Poor baby!” Bandages wounds
That scene has played on a loop in the back of my brain for decades. It’s fucking hilarious. That and when the evil master reveals his name is Betty, and plays Big Butts. I loved that movie before I started smoking weed, and I loved it even more the first time I watched it stoned.
It felt ahead of its time because it was basically a tech demo showcasing their 3D modeling abilities. It was partially a foray into video media, but it was mostly a “hey, look what we can do”. It came out 17 days before Final Fantasy X, which was their move into much more realistic graphics and longer cinematic cutscenes. It was basically an ad to convince people to buy the next 100 hour game.
Still a great movie tho. Shows how far you can go when you’re truly passionate.
Meh, it depends. I don’t use either as a solid indicator of anything because Morbius fits your first description and that movie was hot ass. Same with 2016 Suicide Squad and the Mortal Kombat reboot. All of those movies had low or mixed critic scores with moderately high to high audience scores and they all suck.
Morbius isn’t a great one to point at as an example where this rule of thumb fails because the reviews were brigaded. It was a huge meme and would have been flooded with meme user reviews.
A friend of mine always gets me to download weird shit (to me). That is one that sticks out. The latest request was renfield, with Nic Cage playing dracula.
Nah. It STARTED out amazing in the first act with subzero and scorpion in the Japanese village, but once that scene is over, the entire second act drags and is by far the biggest act in the movie. Then when things finally start picking up again in the third act, its almost over. Plus theres stupid stuff like Subzero speaking english in 1400 japan when he was speaking chinese for the majority of the film and then a little japanese plus much more. I guess it wasn’t absolutely horrible, but definitely not amazing.
Which then it’s bogged down by cole young, who shouldn’t have been the human surrogate for the audience. Honestly, it should’ve been Kano, which would’ve improved this movie by a lot.
Mortal Kombat was a fun movie, and exactly fits the description. The whole plot is basically a series of setups for characters to fight, and characters are a bit one-dimensional, which is exactly what we all want from Mortal Kombat movies.
No it doesn’t. It doesn’t do “Mortal Kombat” enough. Whenever the film is actually doing “what we all” wanted it to, it instead focuses on other shit that no one cares about (Cole) and finally just gives us like these little bursts of Mortal Kombat that should’ve been longer. And saying a character is one-dimensional is never a compliment. Characters can still be simple and still have just enough depth to matter. Cole is painfully one-dimensional and is constantly shoved in your face, only to have a tiny role at the end of the movie, which is dumb. Also, many of the series classic characters are just shoved into the background while, again, focusing on stuff that neither the GA or the MK fans care about. Then you have Raiden, who completely sucks in this movie and apparently had the power to banish anyone he wanted at any time, but doesn’t do anything to Shang Tsung earlier in the movie because…reasons.
Netherrealm knew how to write these stories better and they should have more control over the story the same way CDPR had more control over the Cyberpunk anime story. The Mortal Kombat reboot is dogshit and people making excuses for it isn’t going to improve the sequel.
At first glance none of the critics we’re fans of the original TV show so they thought the adaptation waa harmless fun. Reviewers who we’re fans of the original show hates it.
Tank Girl. No one liked that movie when it came out. I left the theater with the biggest grin on my face. Absolutely awesome. Still one of my favorites.
It was completely different than the comics but it was still very fun. Especially in 1995.
I’ll have to remember that; I only saw it just after its release and don’t remember being anything other than indifferent. I’ve never read the comic though; the author/artist of the comic is part of the duo of the Gorillas, correct?
I loved Ron Perlman’s Hellboy, but the Hellboy 2019 movie was the best. Felt more like a comicbook pulp story and less of a 2000-ish action comedy. But the public and critics has spoken; if it ain’t a standard superhero action comedy flick, it is a “soulless” reboot.
David Harbour had the potential to be a better Hellboy than Perlman, but the rest of the movie was … really not very good – in pacing, characters, or effects.
If you want a mash-up horror movie that’s more fun than the critics said, go for the 2004 Van Helsing.
I loved Van Helsing. It was seriously brain dead entertainment but action was great and the effects were good. I loved The Brothers Grimm, that came out the year after, better though. Horror movie, comedy, action. I passed that movie over back then because of the critics, so took a few more years until I actually got to see it.
Loved the characters, but the movie plot felt like a clipshow of a bigger plot that didn’t fit into 2 hours. I haven’t watched the anime but it probably was.
That’s exactly what it was. They just lifted their favorite parts from multiple different iterations of the story. The original movie and the original TV show, mainly. But those two don’t even canonically fit together.
It was a jumbled mess and it sucked. The original anime, its sequel, and the original TV show are all fantastic, however.
Watch the anime, everything that was great in the 2016 version is a bow to the “original”. And I actually think Johansson was a great cast for the film. The way she moves is so totally Major Kusanagi.
Remember that the tomatometer is not a quality rating, but more the ratio of like vs dislike. A low rating just means that it’s either a polarizing movie or one that is hard to watch for the general audience.
I think Constantine got some redemption in past few years; a lot of people were initially angry with Keanu’s casting and the divergence from the comic book character. A little over a decade after its release I started seeing articles saying that it was much better than everyone’s initial knee-jerk reactions. I’ve always liked it and bought the DVD for it as soon as it was available.
I’m surprised at Hellboy and Robocop though as I don’t know anyone who disliked either of them. My only complaint about the Robocop reboot was it just didn’t seem … “tight” enough. Like there was wasted screen time but I’m not director and wouldn’t know what to cut.
I was not aware of that. Oh dear, that sounds like the kind of plot studio execs would come up with in the 80’s while high on coke, except they are all woke now.
Yeah, on the one hand it’s absolutely wild and uses an incredible amount of unique work. On the other hand, it’s absolutely wild and genuinely meets expectations for a portal to hell.
I’d probably want to see the full cut, eventually, but it’d definitely be an event.
It is a horror movie so that could put a lot of folks off, especially with some of the imagery. That’s one of my favorites but just a theory on why others may not like it.
As always, it has to be kept in mind how the RT scores work. It doesn’t aggregate scores, it just aggregates if the review is positive or negative.
A movie with hundred critics saying “Yeah, the movie is fine I guess” will score higher than a movie with 90 of those critics saying “This is the best movie I’ve ever seen!” and 10 of them not really feeling it.
The concept of mass critic aggregation also just has fundamental problems compared to following and learning the tastes of a specific critic, in order to evaluate their review.
I love the dismissal of critics as a while because a movie you like scored low. It’s a good creepy movie but it’s no that good of a movie overall. It’s very cheesy, the dialogue is poor, the story is minimal. It’s got great creeps though.
I enjoy critics that can clearly convey the reasons why a movie might hit or miss for their audiences. I detest critics that have to dissect a film and score it low because it doesn’t meet their art house ideals.
And there are people who feel the exact opposite of me. Which is fine.
What? I still hold that movie as the scariest thing I’ve ever seen. It grips me just thinking about some scenes. It’s an amazing movie. Can’t believe the score
Like, I can see why others wouldn’t like it, because it has issues, but MAN! It’s an imaginative, sprawling sci-fi epic and we don’t really get those anymore. I mean, we never truly got them apart from Star Wars. That’s why I love it. It sets up a universe that hints at SO MUCH MORE but is content to play in its own little corner.
John Carter has a similar place in my heart.
I’m willing to bet I’d also like Valerian, but I can’t stand Cara Delevigne :/
I, Robot, especially after reading the books. It functions as a combo of the books, but set roughly where the first book took place in, using a variant of the protagonist from the sequels. The robots taking over as they did, though, wasn’t really accurate, even just regarding the laws of robotics, but it worked for the movie’s conflict. In the books, they get a larger hold on humanity, but to help them go past Earth to become an intragalactic society. For a one-off, though, I can see the directions the movie took to give it that close-ended feeling. Also, the implications of robots and humans, and Spooner as a chracter were pretty faithful to the source material, IMO.
Do people not like I, Robot? It’s a fun movie that doesn’t feel like cheesy sci-fi to me. The ridiculous spinning camera toward the end was over the top, but the rest of the movie was decent.
It was seen as a new low when it came to product placement, which was much talked about at the time. There’s a scene where someone compliments Will Smith’s character’s shoes and the camera zooms in on them while he says “vintage 200X” that was incredibly reviled.
Ah yeah, the Chuck Taylor reference, it was brief, but considering how it had been criticized it must’ve stuck out in how obvious it sounded. It’s at least a far cry from being Hawaii 5-0 tier, thankfully.
People don’t like it because it has nothing to do with the source material beyond some character names. It’s literally a random action script that had Asimov slapped on top of it just so the studio could legally claim to be using their movie rights. No relation to the book. Nothing at all like anything the original author himself would have ever written, to the point of being disrespectful to one of the greatest of the genre.
Asimov didn’t write action movies or stories that could become action movies at all. But the elements in the movie I Robot are all solidly woven into Asimov’s work.
But I agree it’s a tradgedy that it’s a lot closer to Minority report than to Bicentennial Man, Total Recall, or Blade Runner, as far as adaptations go.
I’m not mad at what we got, but we could have had a lot more Asimov and a lot less action movie tropes.
All that said, Will Smith’s deliver of “11% is more than enough. A human being would have known that.” is an incredibly worthy condensation of Asimov’s core tension across the books.
I haven’t heard anyone personally that outwardly disliked it, I picked it based on the RT/metacritic score and me enjoying it despite that. I was way too young to remember fresh reactions to the movie when it came out.
I would say the only thing the movie has in common with the book is that it mentions the book’s main character and the laws of robotics. The book is all about weird behavior of robots that actually obey the laws but the movie just treats them as some corporate doublespeak.
Yeah, I don’t think Spooner is identical to Elijah Baley, but I see they connect on the technophobe aspects, if nothing else. It’s been a while since I’ve read the books, in other aspects they’re probably vastly different.
The main character in I, Robot is Dr. Susan Calvin. It also features Donovan and Powell. Elijah is from the robot trilogy, which happens centuries after I, Robot.
“The Caves of Steel” is very much part of the “I Robot” storyline, and not an important distinction here. I also expected Dr Susan Calvin, but when talking about what we actually got, it’s closest to an adaptation of the R. Daneel trilogy.
And anyway, on Asimov’s average scale, those years are right next to eachother. /s
I think it was fine. Dunno why the hatred for it. Yes sure, Asimov was a genius with how he made up new concepts and immediately started playing with them, and the movie doesn’t quite live up to that.
But also the story is (loosely) based on a short story that’s like what, 10 pages long? I, Robot is a collection of random short stories, so I’m not sure what people expected from a movie with that name. Maybe something like Animatrix?
If you wanna see some real butchering of Asimov’s work, there’s the Foundation series…
I posted the same movie before seeing this. I wish they would make a TV series of these books instead of Foundation. I thought the movie was a good robot movie, but was very disappointed that it didn’t follow the books.
It was to my understanding they’d already had a movie written and only brought in “I, Robot” because it was familiar to some of the audience and they could pick the corpse of the book for buzzwords. Even the ending credits say the movie was “inspired by” the collection of short stories.
On the topic of Isaac Asimov stories on the big screen, I nominate Bicentennial man. 36% critic and 59% audience score respectively.
I thought it did a good with the themes it brought forth and Asimovs testing of the types of conflicts that would occur with Robots gaining sentience and humanity seeing them as just machines.
Despite the one event near the end that would create a conflict with the laws of Robotics and the effect it should have on a positronic brain.
What!? Hackers at 31%? The one with young Angelina Jolie? The critics gotta be some uncultured swine. That movie was gold! It was The Matrix type of cool before The Matrix. It put the punk part into cyberpunk for a lot of kids.
Also its a bad influence: Got kids inspired to learn about phreaking and phone systems.
Hackers, absolute gold! People like to crap all over it because it’s not realistic, but the vibe of it really fits the hacking scene. Another similar movie, that has some pretty cool hacking vibe, but people also crap all over is Swordfish, 26% tomatoes, 59% audience.
almost no movie has realistic hacking, but i always thought “Hackers” was pretty spot on (for example with the phone phreaking, social engineering). When i think about movies with unrealistic hacking scenes the following come to mind:
“The Core” has a scene where “rat” whistles into a mobile phone to get free long distance calls (wrong time period)
in “Skyfall” they look through a hex dump and find non-hex characters
To me, the worst offender is the pocket sized brute force device that displays one character at a time as it figures out a door passcodes.
On any reasonbly secure system, it would try 15 combinations and the doors would lock and an alarm would sound.
When I write a password checker that awards partial credit, I will be fired immediately for gross incompetence.
Door security systems are frequently the weak point in an otherwise modern system, and the pocket flashy device is actually unrealistically slow in letting the hacker in. An instant happy beep and a green light and an unlocked door would be more realistic.
That said, a surprisingly high quality hacker movie is “Sneakers”.
Pitch Black put Vin Diesel on my radar as an actor.BI expected less than nothing from that film, and Vin has like 3 lines of dialog, and just carries it.
It’s refreshingly daring hard scifi. And yes, it’s also charming SciFi channel schlock. Both are somehow true.
Agreed, although I was disappointed in the last one, but that’s because Chronicles was my favorite, and I had hoped it would spawn a Star Wars-esque space opera like series. I was super invested in the world. We still never got to see the underverse! I get what happened with three. Two didn’t do well enough to support the investment that a true sequel would require, so they tried to cater more towards the pitch black “space thriller” audience, but it just felt like they rewrote pitch black on another planet.
Yea I get that, specially with the last one they had to put him right back into the pitch black cenario, but still enjoyable to watch, probably because how good vin diesel portrays this character. I’ve seen several posts on his Instagram about an upcoming Riddick film, but when? I guess after another FF.
Add comment