The “loathsome and reprehensible” movie Roger Ebert despised: “I cannot recommend this”
Even though his job was to comment, critique, and analyse movies as the sum of their parts, sometimes, a film would contain a character that Roger Ebert simply couldn’t condone under any circumstances.
Bizarrely, his least favourite fictional figure of all time was a CGI snowman voiced by Michael Keaton in 1998’s Jack Frost, with the critic repulsed by the way the supposedly endearing title character was instead presented as utter nightmare fuel that left him deeply unsettled and uncomfortable.
Another protagonist, to use the term loosely, fronted a feature that Ebert graciously awarded two stars, despite noting that “a zero-star rating for this movie could easily, and in my case, even rapturously, be justified.” He had to look at the bigger picture, though, and he determined that everything else apart from the main character was solid enough to merit half marks.
That’s enough to make you wonder what actor could have gotten under his skin to leave him shocked and appalled at everything they do onscreen. This is supposed to be intended as something of a compliment, but if any 21st-century performer has cornered the market better than anyone else in playing cantankerous arseholes, then it’s hard to look past Danny McBride.
He played his first leading role in a film in Jody Hill’s 2008 caper, The Foot Fist Way, which he also co-wrote. Setting the stage for most of what was to come, McBride’s Fred Simmons is the abrasive and completely clueless master of a low-key martial arts dojo, plunged into an existential crisis when he finds out his wife has been unfaithful, setting him off on a quest to meet his hero, Ben Best’s Chuck ‘The Truck’ Wallace.
“The hero of The Foot Fist Way is loathsome and reprehensible and isn’t a villain in any traditional sense,” Ebert wrote. “Five minutes spent in his company, and my jaw was dropping. Ten minutes, and I realised he existed outside any conventional notion of proper behaviour. Children should not be allowed within a mile of this film, but it will appeal to Jackass fans and other devotees of the joyously ignorant.”
Describing Simmons as having “the instincts of a fascist,” with “offensiveness that applies across a wide range of behaviour.” That includes insults, inappropriateness, and near-the-knuckle humour, leaving Ebert to marvel that McBride’s performance as the belligerent antihero was “appallingly convincing,” calling him “a real piece of work.”
“I cannot recommend this movie,” he ominously intoned. “But I can describe it, and then it’s up to you. If it sounds like a movie you would loathe, you are correct. If it doesn’t, what can I tell you? What it does, it does well, even the point of its disgusting final scene.” Hardly a glowing appraisal, then, with Ebert so disgusted by McBride’s Simmons that he couldn’t encourage people to watch The Foot Fist Way in good conscience.
Like many of the co-writer and star’s work, though, it did achieve a small modicum of cult success and helped kickstart his industry ascension, so it wasn’t all doom and gloom.
