The “lifeless” career-killing flop Roger Ebert hated with a passion: “A truly dreadful film”
Good movies bomb at the box office all the time, just like bad movies regularly make a shit ton of money. There was one film that tanked so hard it became a byword for commercial failure, though, and it was also one that Roger Ebert loathed for every second of its miserable 107-minute existence.
A production has to fail pretty spectacularly to become synonymous with the idea of crashing, burning, and exploding into a thousand tiny pieces of nothingness upon arrival in the multiplex, and things went so disastrously wrong that in the four decades since its release, the director hasn’t stepped back behind the camera.
It was almost the textbook definition of ‘too big to fail’; take a talented and proven filmmaker, pair them with two of the industry’s most well-known stars who were capable of excelling in dramatic roles while still drawing in a crowd, and hand them a hefty budget for a crowd-pleasing adventure that would give critics and audiences the best of both worlds. In Ishtar‘s case, both parties ended up with neither.
By the time Elaine May called action on her fourth feature, she was an Academy Award-nominated screenwriter, a Golden Globe-nominated actor, and a Grammy-winning comedian, so it’s an understatement to say she was a woman of many talents. Even her first three films were widely acclaimed, so there was no reason to believe that Ishtar would be anything other than decent.
As the budget spiralled out of control and the behind-the-scenes battles continued, it became increasingly clear that Hoffman and Beatty’s two-hander was doomed. So doomed, in fact, that it became one of the biggest financial disasters in Hollywood history and was sounded out as one of the worst movies ever made. Sentiments have shifted somewhat on that front, but at the time, it was almost unanimous.
“Ishtar is a truly dreadful film, a lifeless, massive, lumbering exercise in failed comedy,” Ebert began his 0.5-star review. “Elaine May, the director, has mounted a multimillion-dollar expedition in search of a plot so thin that it hardly could support a five-minute TV sketch. And Beatty and Hoffman, good soldiers marching along on the trip, look as if they’ve had all wit and thought beaten out of them. This movie is a long, dry slog. It’s not funny, it’s not smart, and it’s interesting only in the way a traffic accident is interesting.”
The story, which follows the two leads as their bumbling musicians try to make a success of themselves as lounge singers in Morocco before inadvertently getting embroiled in a plot to overthrow the ruler of the neighbouring fictional country of Ishtar, was sorely lacking on every front, so Ebert didn’t need to point it out.
“The movie cannot be said to have a plot,” he handily pointed out anyway. “It exists more as a series of cumbersome set pieces, such as the long, pointless sequence in the desert that begins with jokes about blind camels and ends with Hoffman and Beatty firing machine guns at a helicopter. It probably is possible to find humour in blind camels and helicopter gunfights, but this movie leaves the question open.”
Time has been a bit kinder to Ishtar than maybe it deserves, but make no mistake; at the time, Ishtar was treated as an affront to the senses. May recovered, earning another Oscar nod for her writing, winning an honorary gong, and scooping a Tony for her acting, but she never directed another feature again.
