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.
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
The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. Sure it’s campy and way over the top. But I kinda like it for that. Plus the characters are awesome, the designs were pretty cool, and Sean Connery was great. Currently at 17% on rt.
It was great up until the last 15 minutes, I remember. And it was beautifully artful. But I was a bit colored by the comics, the villain and his motives was just so much better there.
I genuinely loved that movie. Watched it as a kid, got the DVD as I got older, downloaded the torrent when I was in college, watched it with friends for movie nights.
I had no idea it was supposed to be bad! I loved the weird fusion of camp, bizarre situations, and genuine action. Although I did have to chuckle at one of the reviews criticizing its CGI, written twelve years after the movie came out.
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.
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.
The only time I ever heard anything Rush Limbaugh say that I agreed with is that he thought Vanilla Sky was a good movie. Interestingly, he said it to a left-wing caller and they found common ground for a few minutes about the movie.
Yes, I occasionally had to listen to Limbaugh unfortunately.
I feel like prince of Persia missed on timing more than anything. It came out too close to dragon emperor imo. And the same year as clash of the titans. It’s a decent flick, but not good enough to outrun the comparisons on what all 3 did poorly. (Mostly dialog)
I find the action sequences backwards. Usually, I like sequences in increasing order: 1st is ok, 2nd is better, 3rd is best. Sucker Punch was the opposite. I LOVED the first sequence and then the subsequent ones less so.
Also, I think it had far more potential if it had been rewritten or worked on a little more. Yes, the hot chicks in fight scenes are nice, but the writing keeps a movie over time. It’s essentially an anime music video but live action.
I didn’t understand the hate Sucker Punch got until I found out that the theatrical release was cut down to a PG-13 movie. To make it PG-13 they had to cut the core themes from the movie since they were not PG-13 appropriate.
I had only watched the unrated directors cut and never saw the theatrical version so any time I talked about this movie people had no idea what I was talking about. The story and supporting scenes were completely gutted and that’s why people say the movie didn’t have a good story - it was removed.
Have you watched it recently? I would’ve said the same thing but I rewatched it like a month ago for the first time in years and that movie is a mess. Like there is a lot not working. Even the action is a bit meh. The whole structure still just begs more questions than answers. Zach really should’ve just been like “oh no we are in a video game, time for the robot samurai level” instead of girls imagining fighting samurai as they grind on a guys lap in a stripper prison inside of the reality of a psycho ward
I like those too, in particular Dune and the Chronicles of Riddick, but they all have audience scores above 60% (and Stargate and Dune are from the last millennium if we’re sticking to that requirement).
yup. Although with the amount of people wanting to see them in the movie, it’s possible that they still might do it with enough cash, err I mean incentives
TRON Legacy is one of those movies where I watch it purely for its visuals and music. It's a let down in terms of story and action, but I stop everything to look at it when its on.
There’s one reason the original TRON wouldn’t play today, and it’s not the 1980s fake computer graphics. It’s the pacing. TRON is slow. There’s no jitter. It looks like a 1980s video game, not a 21st-century video game.
Or, really, just contrast the Wendy Carlos score with the Daft Punk one. The original is majestic swoops through a digital dreamscape, not jitterbug pop for robot dancers.
A thought that may help you enjoy Tron: Legacy - The pacing and style changes are meant to represent the changes in computer technology and specifically gaming, between the eras when the two films came out.
In TRON, there’s a mechanistic pacing that reflects the early computer clock cycles.
In TRON: Legacy, there’s a lot of imagery and plotting around characters trying to find peace, or achieve slowness, or even just rythm - trying to escape the attention starved modern algorithm.
A long music video is pretty much how I sell it, lol. Also a good movie to watch while in an altered state (it's my go-to movie when I get really sick/feverish).
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?
They are terrible actors but I think they were handled well. Because the characters were written for them, they really just had to be themselves.
I think their prominence in the movie is what resulted in such a bad score. Even without the personal controversies, they are polarizing artists. Few people have a neutral reaction to their stuff. At the time I was pretty into their music, so seeing them in the movie was fun for me.
Wow, I never would have guessed Chappie was even considered “bad.”. I love this movie and just recently watched it again and enjoyed it completely. It’s like a charming reverse RoboCop.
I liked Chappie a lot when it came out, I was and still am a fan of Neill Blomkamp’s work, but found this one harder to enjoy over the years the more I learned about how awful the two people from Die Antwoord are in real life.
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.
Idiocracy is one of my favorite movies. When it came out, it was far below 50%, but after some of the things on the movie started becoming true, it became popular.
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