Five bad movies that Quentin Tarantino absolutely loves
By and large, Quentin Tarantino makes movies that critics and audiences love. After he came to the fore in the 1990s as the most exciting voice in American cinema with Pulp Fiction, he kept improving with films like Kill Bill, Inglourious Basterds, and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. He somehow routinely manages to marry high and lowbrow cinema, with A-list casts and movies that reference cinema history without feeling like cheap imitations.
Tarantino’s incredible critical and commercial cache is especially fascinating when you consider his influences. He’s always been open about how he grew up loving exploitation films, horror movies, pulpy crime thrillers, and martial arts extravaganzas as much as the canonized classics of cinema – and he has somehow managed to synthesise it all into his work.
This wide and varied taste in material others might consider “less than” has always meant Tarantino’s opinions on movies can be quite different from his peers. He’s also never been one to mince words and loves getting his opinions out there. It means his fans can often look forward to Tarantino lambasting a film most critics have fawned over while praising another that has been dismissed entirely.
Here are five times Tarantino went against the grain of what the film community had decided was “bad,” and admitted to loving films few others would admit to even liking.
Five bad movies that Quentin Tarantino absolutely loves:
Green Lantern
In January 2012, IGN ran a headline which likely caused cinephiles all over the world to keel over, shocked and horrified at the sheer improbability of such a collection of words being true. It read: “Tarantino Liked Green Lantern More Than Drive” – and the sound you just heard was cinema-loving brains exploding all over again after re-reading the headline.
As a dyed-in-the-wool film geek, Tarantino used to compile lists of his favourite films of the year. In his 2011 list, he included a couple of blockbusters in the top ten – Rise of the Planet of the Apes at number two, and X-Men: First Class at number 5. Amusingly, he also had future ‘Best Picture’ winner The Artist tied at number ten with the mostly forgotten Paul Rudd vehicle Our Idiot Brother.
Our interest comes from the “Others he liked in no particular order” category, though, which included Green Lantern. The much-maligned Ryan Reynolds superhero film’s reputation has been dragged through the mud repeatedly since its release, with the star himself getting a ton of mileage out of making fun of it via the Deadpool movies. Tarantino saw something in the Martin Campbell-directed misfire, though – and he liked it better than the beloved Ryan Gosling arthouse thriller Drive, which only made it into Tarantino’s “Nice Try” category. Ouch.
Battlefield Earth
Few films have as nuclear a reputation as John Travolta’s 2000 folly Battlefield Earth. These days, it’s mostly seen as “that weird Scientology movie where Travolta is an alien guy with dreadlocks,” but when it was released, it truly seemed like a career-ender. Travolta making a film based on a novel by the founder of his controversial faith was bad enough. Still, the movie itself was so shoddy, the box office so lukewarm, and the critical reaction so vitriolic that it seemed like Travolta wouldn’t be able to return from it.
According to director Roger Christian, though, there were a couple of very famous names who absolutely loved Battlefield Earth. In 2000, Christian claimed to The Guardian, “When I felt better about everything was when George Lucas and Quentin Tarantino, and a lot of people that I felt knew what they were doing, saw it and thought it was a great piece of science fiction.”
Christian further claimed that Tarantino attended the premiere, sat beside him for the movie, and then hugged him tightly when it finished. Instead of stopping there, he swore that Tarantino looked him in the eye and said, “This is what I want to write. This is amazing stuff.”
The Intern
In January 2016, Tarantino spoke to Metro about a very important motion picture. It was a film which featured a performance by the legendary Robert De Niro so damn fantastic that Tarantino felt he should’ve been in Academy Award consideration for it. He felt the film had one of the best scripts written by its female writer/director, who also should have been in the running for Oscars.
“One of my favourite movies this last year was Nancy Meyers’ The Intern,” confirmed a deadly serious Tarantino. “They’re not considering that for the Oscars even though I think Robert De Niro gave one of the best performances this year in that movie.” He then said the script was just as good as the one Meyers wrote for It’s Complicated, a 2009 romcom with Meryl Streep, Steve Martin, and Alec Baldwin. Amusingly, that movie also wasn’t overly well-received by the critical community, although it did fare better than The Intern, which was widely derided.
Fascinatingly, speaking about the film led Tarantino to a very salient point about Hollywood’s diversity issues, specifically when it comes to women helming major movies. He mused, “It does seem to be to some degree there’s a boom or bust aspect when it comes to Hollywood when it comes to female directors. There becomes an era when there’s a lot working, then that settles down, and there’s a dry period.”
Jason X
In 2007, Tarantino was asked by FHM to compile a list of his favourite death scenes in cinema history. What triumphs from the vast array of iconic death scenes would he pick? Surely the shower scene from Psycho? Or maybe Willem Dafoe’s arms-to-the-heavens demise in Platoon? How about John Hurt getting the world’s worst case of chest cramps in Alien? Or Sean Bean being filled with arrows in The Lord of the Rings?
Well, if you thought Tarantino would have picked any deaths as obvious as those, then you just don’t know the director. Delving into the grindhouse archive that is his encyclopedic brain, Tarantino spotlighted 1981 slasher The Prowler, writing about how the killer “goes into the shower, where the chick is naked, and he stabs her with a pitchfork and, as she’s screaming, he lifts her up the wall.” Pure cinematic poetry.
For his number one, Tarantino chose the severed arm scene from the lurid Dario Argento classic Tenebrae, but his number two pick interests us most. In 2004, the Friday the 13th franchise jetted off into space for Jason X, a comedy horror riot that cryogenically freezes the monstrous killer and then defrosts him in 2455 as a cyborg. The film died at the box office, and critics hated it with a passion – but Tarantino thought it contained the second-best death in cinema history. He simply loved how Jason “solidifies a woman’s face by forcing it into liquid nitrogen, then slams it against a counter so it shatters like glass.”
The Lone Ranger
These days, Gore Verbinski’s 2013 adaptation of classic pulp hero The Lone Ranger is unlikely to get many plaudits in the critical community. Firstly, its two main stars—Johnny Depp and Armie Hammer—are both persona non grata in Hollywood circles for different reasons. Then there’s the fact that the decidedly non-Native American Depp played the iconic Native American character Tonto—something that simply wouldn’t have flown even a few years later.
At the time of its release, though, the film wasn’t exactly a resounding success, even with two non-cancelled stars. Critics said it was bloated, bland, and jumbled, and it wound up being one of the biggest box-office disasters in movie history, grossing a scant $260million worldwide, yet costing between $225 and $250million to make. Indeed, after marketing was factored in, insiders believed it lost Disney upwards of $190million.
Later that year, though, Tarantino spoke to Les Inrockuptibles and revealed he went to see the film despite the barrage of negativity surrounding it. He revealed, “The first 45 minutes are excellent. The next 45 minutes are a little soporific.” Thankfully, though, the film’s showpiece action sequence delivered in spades for Tarantino, as he remarked, “Then comes the train scene—incredible! When I saw it, I kept thinking, ‘What, that’s the film that everybody says is crap? Seriously?'”
Never Miss A Take
The Far Out Quentin Tarantino Newsletter
All the latest Quentin Tarantino content from the independent voice of culture.
Straight to your inbox.