The “half-witted, lame-brained” movie Roger Ebert couldn’t wait to end: “Endless, pointless and ridiculous”
While some people have no issues abandoning a movie once they realise they don’t like it, anyone who doesn’t has suffered the agony of sitting in the cinema or at home waiting for the credits to roll and the agony to end. Roger Ebert didn’t walk out of many films, but he’d have been better off doing it more often.
Since he was a critic, he couldn’t just up and leave any time there was a picture that tested his patience; otherwise, he wouldn’t have written as many reviews as he did. It took a special kind of awful to convince him that there was no point hanging around until the screen faded to black, which forced him to sit through an alarming amount of dreck as a matter of professional necessity.
If there are any positives to be found from his experience watching Bruce Beresford’s 1989 rom-com, Her Alibi, it’s that it only lasted for 94 minutes. Presuming that he didn’t hang around to pore over the list of names in the credits, then it only occupied an hour and a half of his life. It could have been much worse, but it was still bad enough.
“You know a movie is in trouble when you start looking at your watch,” he wrote. “You know it’s in bad trouble when you start shaking your watch because you think it might have stopped. Her Alibi is a movie in the second category; endless, pointless, and ridiculous, right up to the final shot.” That was his opening line, and he still found the time to call it “desperately bankrupt of imagination and wit.”
It was Beresford’s first release of 1989, and it’s fair to say that the second did better than the first. Whereas Her Alibi barely recouped its budget in ticket sales, was roundly panned, and earned Paulina Porizkova a ‘Worst Actress’ nomination at the Razzies, he atoned for his mistakes nine months later. Sort of.
In December, the filmmaker’s Driving Miss Daisy debuted, and it would go on to win Academy Awards for ‘Best Picture’, ‘Best Actress’ for Jessica Tandy, ‘Best Adapted Screenplay’, and ‘Best Makeup’, in addition to hoovering up $145 million. However, it’s since been reappraised as one of the weakest and most undeserving winners of the Oscars’ biggest prize in history, but at least it was better than his previous effort.
Tom Selleck and his domineering moustache joined forces to bring mystery novelist Philip Blackwood to life, with the bestselling author seeking to overcome writer’s block and find fresh inspiration by attending a murder trial, where he starts to believe that Porizkova’s defendant is actually guilty of the crime of which she’s been accused. As one does, he lets her stay in his house, which pisses off the KGB.
“If the plot of his novel is half-witted, the plot of the movie is lame-brained,” Ebert suggested, and not without reason. “The movie betrays its desperation by straying outside the confines of even this cookie-cutter plot for such irrelevant episodes.” One such episode finds Selleck shooting himself in the arse with an arrow, to hint at what kind of comedy Her Alibi deploys in an attempt to mine its laughs.
Further describing the film with such enticing superlatives as being “filled with groaningly bad moments” and calling the entire thing “arbitrary and senseless,” Ebert couldn’t have escaped the auditorium fast enough to furiously scribble down his withering 0.5-star review.
