The 2002 Angelina Jolie movie Roger Ebert hated: “Elbows sticking out where the knees should be”
Film critics are famously hard to please, and none more so than the archetypal example of a film critic, Roger Ebert – though, to be fair to the veteran film writer, Hollywood provided him with a steady stream of godawful flicks to sink his teeth into over the course of his some 50-year career as a critic.
One such film, which can only have been made specifically to annoy the Chicago Sun writer, was the 2002 romantic comedy, Life or Something Like It. Haven’t seen it? Don’t worry, nobody else has, either. A classic example of the kind of soulless, substanceless, pithy rom-coms that were ten-a-penny during the early days of the new millennium, the film starred Angelina Jolie in the leading role as a local news reporter forced to grapple with life and existentialism when a self-professed prophet predicts her death.
A bizarre plotline, yes, but one which you could imagine being pulled off with some degree of grace and intrigue by a talented team of filmmakers. Instead, Jolie spends the majority of the film in a romantic crisis, attempting to further her career and make it in New York City – essentially, the film manages to condense the spirit of Rachel from Friends into a sub-two-minute runtime, making the character far more vapid and translucent than ever before.
In a one-star review of the film, published the day of its theatrical release back in April 2002, Ebert – as was always typical in his reviews – did not hold back when it came to his utter detest of the film, nor did he waste any time in getting across what he thought of it.
“This is an ungainly movie, ill-fitting, with its elbows sticking out where the knees should be,” he wrote in the introductory paragraph.
“To quote another ancient proverb,” he continued, “‘A camel is a horse designed by a committee.’ Life or Something Like It is the movie designed by the camel.” He goes on to poke holes in virtually every aspect of the plotline, including glaring errors in the mechanics of local television stations and new networks, suggesting that the filmmakers did not carry out the most basic of research before writing or shooting the dreadful film.
Ebert was often known to go against the grain of the masses when it came to some of his more scathing movie reviews, his hatred of Life or Something Like It seemed to track with its reception in the wider world.
Upon its initial release, the film was a catastrophic box office flop, recuperating less than half of its $40million budget. In the box office rankings, it even fell below the bizarre and long-forgotten sci-fi instalment of the Friday the 13th franchise, Jason X.
As if that wasn’t enough, Angelina Jolie also earned a Razzie Award nomination for her ‘Worst Actress’ for the film, although her ego was saved when she lost out to Madonna in Swept Away and Britney Spears in Crossroads, who tied for the title.
In other words, Roger Ebert certainly wasn’t the only person who hated virtually every frame and every aspect of Angelina Jolie’s diasterpiece Life or Something Like It, and the sheer amount of terrible films Ebert had to sit through over the course of his career should give you a decent indication of just how bad the 2002 effort was to attract such an intensely vicious review from the critic.
