Rotten Tomatoes Hall of Overrated: Installment One--Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull

Nearly every widely-reviewed bad film finds somebody who ought to have known better recommending it. Based on quirks of individual taste (e.g. genre biases, loyalty to source material, resonance with personal experience), even terrible movies like Avatar: The Last Airbender find a handful of critics who, in however qualified terms, nevertheless endorse them. For this reason, RT scores of "zero" on films with more than 20 or so reviews are exceedingly rare. This much is to be expected.

This list, conversely, documents a different phenomena: films that are given general, widespread critical assent despite sucking. These are trickier to explain, and so each film reviewed in this category will feature an attempt to do just that: work out what on earth everyone might have been thinking before awarding that fresh/thumbs up/three-star rating to something that should at best go to an unmarked grave.

This list works in no particular progressive order, nor does it attempt to be an "all-time" ranking. Item ten might be more overrated than item one, and, oh no, I most certainly do not know enough about film to claim that these are the "most" overrated ever. Hence, any comments are welcome to mention others, but these decisions are somewhat arbitrary and based on my own viewing history. My inclusions tend to focus on blockbusters, as these seem to draw the most unwarranted sympathy, but sleeper, indie, and foreign flicks can all be found in this category as well.

Without further ado...

 Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008)

Tomatometer: 78%

South Park has already been all over this one, but it probably deserves one more kick before fading blessedly from memory. The best that can be said--and this is already stretching it--is that this is a good movie trapped inside a bad one. It's not hard to see what happened here: critics, desperate to see Harrison Ford don the whip and fedora one more time before shuffling off this mortal coil, focused on the one or two decent scenes in the film (say, the fun American Graffiti-esque rumble, to pick one of the few moments that works) and then ignored everything else, opting to view the onscreen result instead through the lens of the Aging Screen Legends Lifetime Achievement Award.

There's some justice to this, I suppose, because Ford is the best thing in the film, and director Steven Spielberg and screenwriter David Koepp even wisely allow for his waning (albeit slowly) physical presence and charisma by writing his advancing age into the script. That the film sorta works as a meditation on age and loss is cool and all, but that is, of course, not why anybody came to see it.

But that's really about where Crystal Skull stops paying dividends. Shia LaBeouf as Indy's son and heir-apparent, Mutt Williams, is clueless, looking like he found his way onto the set by accident and leaving the audience unsure if he's the crown prince of a new franchise or an extra hiding in Ford's shadow (he leans toward the latter). The comic chemistry between Indy and Karen Allen's Marion Ravenwood from days of yore seems to have died back in the 80s, as their scenes together are off-key and mistimed, the dialogue, flat and stale as yesterday's lager,  failing to inspire laughs. Supporting characters are either mute (a squandered John Hurt as Professor Oxley, Indy's old mentor), throwaway (Cate Blanchett's Natasha Fatale-inspired baddie Irina Spalko) or generally extraneous to the story (Ray Winstone as Mac McHale, Indy's traitorous sidekick).

But it gets worse. The charming 1930s serial quality, sped-up cameras and literal cliffhangers included, that executive producer George Lucas employed throughout the first three installments in the series has been "modernized." In practice, this means that the original aesthetic--one of the most likeable things about the series--has yielded to Lucas' deepening psychotic obsession, contracted during his endless revisions to the original Star Wars trilogy and refined during the woeful recent films, with replacing all of reality except his actors with computer generated graphics. So now, in the new-and-improved world of Crystal Skull, cars, gophers, ants, monkeys, and waterfalls--objects which occur in reality as we know it, and which can be and have been filmed--are now simply glowing objects in the shiny, transparently artificial sci-fi landscape that Lucas so clearly prefers over the demands of filming live objects. 

The CGI approach stumbles on so many fronts: it obviates Ford's famed habit of doing his own stunts and thus allowing close-up filming of his actual reactions to dangerous situations, kills the campily retro vibe of the earlier films, and fails on its own terms, the alien spaceship effects looking like every other blockbuster in town, more leftovers from The Mummy III than anything unique to the Indiana Jones brand. And unlike the deliberately dated approach that, paradoxically, makes the earlier films timeless, the ill-advised entry into the blazingly fast CGI rat race means that the film already appears outmoded a mere five years later.

Is it a terrible film? No, not really.  A little Harrison Ford, even the current model, goes a pretty long way. Should nearly four out of five critics have recommended it? Only if those were Lucas-generated as well. 

Killer Joe: Delicious, Deep-fried Noir

When I was younger, I'd occasionally read something, like a Hemingway or John Knowles novel, like it, and then recommend it to my mom. She'd read it, sigh, and say, "too depressing," before picking up something by John Grisham. Her critique was purely generic rather than technical: Without telling you what a book had done wrong, she merely wanted to express that she didn't cotton to that kind of thing.

Killer Joe, William Friedkin's gleefully adept trailer-park noir, seems to have been reviewed thus far by a lot of people like Mom. Despite that  it's tautly written, brilliantly cast and acted, and hilariously funny, two out of five "top critics" on Rotten Tomatoes wouldn't recommend it, well, because they just don't like that kind of thing.

The movie is the story of Chris Smith (Emile Hirsch), a small-time drug dealer hunted for a debt to his gangster boss after Chris' detestable mother, Adele, rips off his stash. Getting wind that Adele has a life insurance policy with his sister, Dottie (Juno Temple), as sole beneficiary, Chris enlists Dottie and the pair's father, Ansel (Thomas Haden Church) and his wife, Sharla (Gina Gershon), to put Adele out of everyone's misery before splitting the cash. Dimly aware of the risks of murder and insurance fraud, they seek professional help.

Enter Joe Cooper (Matthew McConaughey), a police detective who contract kills on the side. But the conspirators are too poor to afford him, leading to an arrangement in which, in lieu of cash up front, Dottie is kept as sexual collateral pending the insurance payout. As one might expect, things get appreciably worse from there.

While all of the principals dress up and play Dallas white trash with aplomb, what drives the film is McConaughey's Joe, by turns glib, genteel, and taciturn--precisely the bipolar mix one might expect from a lawman who is also a casual murderer. His journey from coolly in-command to unhinged is underwritten by a pitch-perfect sleazy charm that always seemed extant-but-misplaced in McConaughey's romcom roles. Joe's interplay with Dottie and the always-ambiguous level of mutual sincerity within leaves open the final possibility that we may have just watched a dirty, broken love story.

The script, adapted from his own eponymous play by Tracy Letts, is a deep-fried joy, making the audience alternately cringe on command and laugh, almost always guiltily. And I think herein lies the problem of critical reception. Few would want to admit that they spent two hours in the real world alternately laughing at the depravity of the trailer park or sympathizing with sociopathic killers. It can neatly be termed the "no one to root for" problem, as in, "the film ultimately disappoints because it leaves us no one to root for." But film noir has never left us anyone to root for. The genre is a low-rent morality play in which we watch base motives turn people wild, a vicarious freak show that lionizes and shames the beast within all at once.

Hence, Killer Joe has been called cynical and exploitative, as if this were a flaw and not one of its central aims. Here we get a little meta-criticism: The only sensible metric for reviewing a film for other people is to judge the film for what it is, on its own terms, and not what it isn't. This is exactly how food criticism and wine criticism and, really, most criticisms work. One doesn't review a merlot and then give it a poor score because one doesn't like merlot and then expect to be taken seriously. The question at hand should not be whether you like the genre, but rather if the thing to be observed is good at what it does. Arguing against the film by saying that that it is, to paraphrase one critic, the Jerry Springer Show taken to its natural conclusions, is a bit like saying that one is angry at the bank because it doesn't sell lettuce.

In short, critics who have a conceptual or generic problem with a film have plenty of options. They can see other kinds of film that are more to their tastes; they can write scripts for the films they feel ought to be made; they can even responsibly state up front that something isn't their cup of tea but is nevertheless well-crafted. But giving poor marks to a film about desperate, ignorant, morally reprobate poor people for being a film about desperate, ignorant, morally reprobate poor people is simply smug, self-gratifying nonsense.

Moreover, even the MPAA seems to disapprove of Killer Joe, slapping the film with a death-sentence NC-17 rating. What does a film no more violent than half of Tarantino's oeuvre and far less bloody than any of the Saw or Hostel species of joyless torture porn do to deserve this? Why does a closeup of cutting through screaming people's ankles with a scalpel garner an "R," while killer Joe is declared unfit for the general public? Because it shows body parts that humans are born with, of course. It is always good to be reminded that the MPAA considers murder by graphic dismemberment more appropriate for children than penises and vaginas.

An Undercooked Christmas Cookie: The Day the Earth Stood Still.

Remakes, it seems, present a particular set of problems for critics of all stripes that other films (and songs, and other media) do not pose. They are perilous endeavors, really, in that they give a legion of purists (and pseudo-purists born decades after the source materials) who are itching to hate them for not living up to the gold standard standards of originals since romanticized into classic status. It’s just a mild variant on the book-was-better argument that’s meant more to show off the learning of the reviewer than say anything about the movie itself. You can’t, as every effort from recent horror remakes through Bond updates shows, make the purists happy, as being unhappy with any remake is to them both moral obligation and badge of intellectual honor, even if the original is itself, say, a campy 1950s sci-fi film that itself was probably criticized as brainless eye candy in its own day. That said, we shall take The Day the Earth Stood Still on its own merits, and not those of its earlier namesake, which, besides, I haven’t bothered to see. And really, it’s not all that bad.

First, the story in brief: TDTESS revolves around the appearance of the usual omnipotent extraterrestrials coming to Earth in invincible glowing orbs, who send a herald in the form of a cloned human named Klaatu (Keanu Reeves) defended by an equally impervious giant robot regrettably assigned the acronym GORT. After being wounded upon arrival in Central Park and hospitalized by an otherwise defenseless U.S. military, Klaatu demands to speak to an assembly of world leaders, but is instead examined by a team of coerced scientists including astrobiologist Dr. Helen Benson (Jennifer Connelly). He escapes and meets with Benson and her emotionally troubled stepson Jacob (Jaden Smith) to reveal that all humans are in the process of being judged by a consortium of alien races for their poor environmental stewardship of the planet (an apparent update from the rampant militarism we were given low marks for in the original), and high drama ensues.

The straightforward plot is a serviceable enough vehicle to ask an important question: if there were a purely material, rational judge of human behavior, what might it/they determine about humanity’s future as a sustainable presence on the planet? The casting of Reeves in the role of that judge is undeniably shrewd: his characteristically stilted delivery of lines and inability to believably emote is here, perhaps for the first time on his career, productively exploited—he’s an alien new to human form and custom; he’s supposed to be awkward and emotionally inarticulate. Taking the odd detachment of his screen presence and using it thus is pure lemons-into-lemonade. Connelly is less believable as a top scientist, but her mix of wide-eyed astonishment and determination in the face of horror, if narrow on range, seems at least generally appropriate to the circumstances.

But back to the question: if aliens were looking at the Earth as a biological laboratory/experiment, unspeakably grand in scope and duration, would humans deserve to be removed for messing up the proceedings? The problem that we face in examining the answer is, of course, one of powerful selection bias: it’s the humans making the case for themselves and writing up the lab report, putting the judgment in the mouths of fictional aliens. Since neither space aliens nor nihilists tend to write these movies, the answer, here delivered by screenwriter David Scarpa, presents an argument that might be seen as a wee smidgen leaning toward the case for non-annihilation. That’s a forgivable enough position, I suppose, and probably a fair one, given the fact that the movie presents the case for the defense as a difficult one even for the most educated humans (one a Nobel laureate in an entertaining cameo by John Cleese) to fully endorse without falling back on sheer pleas for clemency. It’s a far cry from the moral certitude that embodies most films about war, even war with alien interlopers, however ridiculous the scenario might be; the script here at least entertains the possibility that the aliens just might have a point.

Is the film ultimately up for a detailed examination of the moral question it presents? Well of course not. It’s a commercial film, after all, designed to be seen in a theater and make back a studio investment. It commits all the usual Hollywood movie-by-numbers sins: everyone is too young and pretty for their jobs, military figures (headed by U.S. Defense Secretary Regina Jackson, an unenthused Kathy Bates) are cardboard mouthpieces for stupidity and aggression, and the finale has to be visually spectacular enough in scope to appeal to those wanting to see a disaster film. But in attempting to serve these two masters, or please everyone, or whatever expression you like, the film seems to truly please no one. With an occasionally conscientious focus on cost and consequence, it’s too smart and slowly paced to be a throwaway smash-‘em-up; too relatively low-budget and seen-that (the CGI effects storm toward the end is none-too-different from either the most recent X-Men or Indiana Jones installments) to be current as disaster gruel; too brief and lightly written to be a drama about the potential moral and ecological priorities of civilizations more advanced than ours. It rises above other, purely visceral, alien invasion movies like Independence Day by virtue of at least trying to say something about how a higher intelligence might engage us, yet not even so far as a mediocre space exploration film like Contact regarding the same question. It has moments, to be sure, but is too undercooked either to succeed as spectacle or speculation. But nevertheless it tries, and in a few, fleeting instances, almost succeeds, at making a film that tackles some hard subject matter that is still more relevant now than 50 years ago, and even hints at hard answers, eschewing the usual feel-goodism that pervades most conclusions of this type. And if it can do that, and blow up a few things and make a few bucks in the process, I say it gets a pass. Since the visual effects are, however, somewhat underwhelming, it might better make for an afternoon diversion on video.

You Will Be Punished: Review of Punisher: War Zone

Where to begin? First, I suppose, a series of caveats is appropriate: I am not, you see, reviewing Punisher: War Zone, in its entirety. Such would imply that I found said entirety, bearable, which I most assuredly did not. In order to relieve my annoyance at paying $11.50 for two tickets to this film (more about it later), reviewer and companion left the theater about midway through and snuck in to watch the second half of Quantum of Solace again, because that movie was entertaining; this follow-up was akin to chasing the half you could stomach of a very bad meal with a good, strong cocktail, or tasty dessert, or antacid, or anything else at all that might help to purge the effects of consuming something repellant.

A second caveat: Since it seems all the rage for angry defenders of bad films to make ad hominem attacks on the reviewer’s general taste in film (and often other things), I will declare several reasons that I did not have for disliking this film to the point of abandoning it in abject dismay. I did not leave because I dislike violence or bloodshed in film. I liked the hell out of 300; I enjoyed Braveheart, Saving Private Ryan—heck, I even thought the first Saw was an interesting enough statement movie. So stylized killing is just fine by me. I did not leave because I dislike comic book movies; I love comic book movies. Just this year I’ve been a happy consumer of The Incredible Hulk, Iron Man, The Dark Knight, and Hellboy II: The Golden Army. I even read The Punisher comics as a teen, so I “get it” just fine: the story of a badass commando turned vigilante by the murder of his family has, in comic book form, a refreshingly brutal simplicity. Since I am an amateur film reviewer, I could have chosen to see any movie, and I chose this one. I wanted to like it—really.

No, I left Punisher: War Zone because it is one of the worst films I have ever seen. There was simply nothing redeeming about it at all, unless a lot of shooting and dying that has been done better in a million other films counts as redeeming, in which case the viewer really needs to raise his standards a bit. The college freshman I teach frequently write better lines than the grieving widow of a federal agent mistakenly killed by The Punisher (listlessly and humorlessly portrayed by Ray Stevenson, who also can’t hide an Anglo-Irish accent in playing this quintessentially American antihero) asking him, “Who punishes you?”; high school productions of Shakespeare (dire endeavors, all) feature better delivery of lines (although Olivier couldn’t do much with this script); the average Halloween party sports makeup as good as that featured on the villainous mobster Jigsaw, disfigured in a Punisher-engineered industrial accident. The cinematography is mediocre, the plot, aside from some vague and nondescript hinting at a biological weapons shipment, nonexistent (at least for as long as I could wait for it), the suspense curiously missing, the suspension of disbelief required to get though a single scene stupefying (I mean, sure, it’s New York, but—no one notices guy in Kevlar and full combat regalia walking through the subway?). The film simply does nothing right.

In this cinematic era of successful remakes and franchise reboots, ranging from zombies to spies to superheroes, the most compelling question to ask of director Lexi Alexander and trio of screenwriters Nick Santora, Art Marcum, and Matt Halloway is: why? The legacy of Batman needed rehabilitation after the increasingly stupid third and fourth installments following Tim Burton’s capable 1989 goth frolic—and so it has been. The Hulk needed to do some proper smashing after Ang Lee’s introspective twaddle—and it came to pass. What the makers of this film thought it might have achieved that previous, also terrible, attempts to bring Frank Castle and his grudge to the big screen did not is anyone’s guess. What they have produced is something that may well make viewers squirm in embarrassment for everyone involved in its production: an R-rated film for twelve year old boys, a marketing trick that requires some bending of local laws to be successful. If the opening weekend returns (4 million on a 35 million production budget) are indicative of the success of this gambit, it would appear that not nearly enough of them have crept past the teens guarding the ticket turnstiles.