The 2008 movie Roger Ebert apologised for walking out of: “They did nothing to deserve this”
Relative to the number of movies he reviewed in his career, Roger Ebert only walked out of a tiny, tiny, tiny fraction of them, and there was only one that he apologised for abandoning before the end.
In theory, the job of a film critic is to persevere to the end credits, regardless of how bad any picture may be. Ebert did that for most of the thousands upon thousands of movies he watched, and it took something either truly terrible or egregiously offensive for him to up sticks and fuck off midway through.
The most famous, or perhaps infamous, example was Tinto Brass’ historical epic, Caligula, which he despised with every fibre of his being. Mediterraneo may have won the Academy Award for ‘Best International Feature’, but 25 minutes of that was more than enough to make up his mind.
Walkouts were incredibly rare, but walking out after eight minutes was nigh-on unthinkable. And yet, that was all the time that Ebert gave writer and director Stewart Wade’s 2008 effort, Tru Loved, with those eight minutes giving him enough runway to compare it to a “not especially good high school play,” and doing a good enough job to let him know that he didn’t need to see any more of it.
He still reviewed it, and he was about as glowing as you’d imagine from someone who’d sat through less than 10% of the running time. He’d clambered up on his high horse and written it off without a second thought, but he was forced to clamber down when the backlash started ringing in his ears.
Understandably, his readers and people within the film industry were furious that Tru Loved was given eight minutes of his time, and instead of not reviewing it because he hadn’t seen anywhere close to the whole thing, he panned what he had seen. In response, Ebert watched it from start to finish, gave it a proper review, and even though he still didn’t like it, he found it in his heart to make an apology.
“I must apologise to writer/director Stewart Wade, his actors, and his crew,” he wrote. “They did nothing to deserve this. For them, it must have been like a drive-by shooting. I feel like a jerk. In even my negative reviews, I try to give some sense of why you might want to see a film, even if I didn’t admire it. Here, I failed.”
Look, Tru Loved was never going to win any Oscars, and it was far from a mainstream concern, being a micro-budget independent feature that barely saw a theatrical release and made less than $10,000 at the box office. Still, gaining infamy and notoriety for having the most prominent critic in pop culture telling everyone he ditched it at the eight-minute mark can’t have been a nice feeling for anyone involved.
It did at least give the film a little bit of publicity that it otherwise wouldn’t have generated, albeit for all the wrong reasons. As mentioned, Ebert had no qualms walking out of anything that he couldn’t bring himself to finish, but Tru Loved became the outlier because it was the only one that made him feel bad.
