The one movie character Roger Ebert hated more than any other: “The most repulsive single creature”
Having cast his eye over thousands upon thousands of movies throughout a career that made him one of the most famous critics in cinema history, it takes a lot for Roger Ebert to single out a solitary character as the one he hated more than any other.
To illustrate just how much he despised them, it’s worth thinking about the bigger picture. At the very least, Ebert reviewed well over 7,000 films. Let’s say that each of those films has at least ten significant speaking roles spread across the main and supporting cast, which is a highly conservative estimate.
Being incredibly generous with the numbers, Ebert saw over 70,000 protagonists, antagonists, bit-part players, and background actors strut their stuff on the silver screen, although that figure is realistically much, much higher. And yet, one of them took pride of place as his most-hated of all time.
That begs the question about which actor in which movie gave such a performance that it became seared into his memory as the indisputable cream of the crappy crop, the character that his years of experience and voluminous consumption of celluloid decreed to be the one he abhorred above all others.
The answer, of course, is a computer-generated snowman voiced by Michael Keaton. Troy Miller’s 1998 family-friendly fantasy comedy, Jack Frost, bombed at the box office and was torn to shreds by critics, but Ebert reserved special ire for the titular carrot-nosed character who left him completely and utterly seething.
“The snowman gave me the creeps,” he wrote in a one-star review. “Never have I disliked a movie character more. They say state-of-the-art special effects can create the illusion of anything on the screen, and now we have proof: it’s possible for the Jim Henson folks and Industrial Light & Magic to put their heads together and come up with the most repulsive single creature in the history of special effects.”
Continuing his scathing takedown, Ebert declared, “To see the snowman is to dislike the snowman.” Thoroughly creeped out by how it “looks like a cheap snowman suit,” doesn’t walk in a conventional sense but operates as if “it’s creeping on its torso,” has “anorexic tree limbs for arms,” and a “big, wide mouth that movies as if masticating Gummi Bears,” he was dumbfounded by Jack Frost as a protagonist and film.
It was supposed to be a wholesome and heartwarming tale about a character who dies in a car accident being reborn as a snowman so he can reconnect with his bereaved son through the magic of the festive spirit, only for Ebert to bear witness to nothing but pure and unadulterated nightmare fuel.
“It’s a bad film, yes, but that’s not the real problem,” he continued. As expected, not even history’s finest auteurs would have changed his mind that Keaton is responsible for the character he hated the most: “Jack Frost could have been co-directed by Orson Welles and Steven Spielberg and still be unwatchable, because of that damned snowman.”
