The Burt Reynolds movie Roger Ebert hated with a passion: “The lowest possible level of ambition”
Hollywood’s biggest stars don’t always make the best movies, which technically isn’t even their job. Stardom is attained by selling tickets, putting butts in seats, and justifying an exorbitant paycheque by headlining a string of lucrative films, something few did better than Burt Reynolds at his peak.
The actor received two Golden Globe nominations during his reign as American cinema’s number-one drawing card from the late 1970s through to the early 1980s, both in the ‘Best Actor – Musical or Comedy’ category at the Golden Globes for The Longest Yard and Starting Over, but he was never a critical darling.
Reynolds only notched a solitary Academy Award nomination for Paul Thomas Anderson’s Boogie Nights, which came when he was decades past his peak. Even at that, he hated every second of working with the independent scene’s newest wunderkind, but he didn’t seem too concerned about being left out of the awards season conversation when he was making millions as the king of the mainstream adventure flick.
Still, plenty of A-listers have lent their names to a succession of box office hits that also find themselves drowning in acclaim, something that arguably didn’t apply to the likes of Smokey and the Bandit, Semi-Tough, and Sharky’s Machine. Roger Ebert was about as venerated as critics got, and there was one Reynolds film he had a particular distaste for.
“The Cannonball Run is an abdication of artistic responsibility at the lowest possible level of ambition,” he wrote in his review. “In other words, they didn’t even care enough to make a good lousy movie. Cannonball was probably always intended as junk, as an easy exploitation picture. But it’s possible to bring some sense of style and humour even to grade-zilch material. This movie doesn’t even seem to be trying.”
The star-studded cross-country caper saw Reynolds supported by a cavalcade of eclectic talent that included Roger Moore, Sammy Davis Jr, Dean Martin, Farrah Fawcett, and Jackie Chan, following the misadventures of the racers embarking on the titular vehicular sprint from Connecticut to California.
It was never intended to be high art, which wasn’t enough for Ebert to give it a passing grade. In fact, he only awarded it half a star, blasting Reynolds for the way he “sleepwalks through a role he’s played several times before, but never so indifferently” before taking a dig at his undeniable star power.
Although Ebert did acknowledge him as “one of the hottest properties in Hollywood” and somebody so popular “he can make money in almost anything,” he suggested that it’s “a maxim that Cannonball Run puts to the extreme test.” As it turned out, Reynolds passed it with flying colours after the movie recouped its production budget almost ten times over in ticket sales.
