Roger Ebert’s 10 most scathing reviews
As one of the most prominent and well-respected critics of his era, Roger Ebert’s opinion on any movie carried a certain amount of weight, regardless of whether he loved or hated the film in question.
Of course, there’s a morbid fascination that makes it infinitely more interesting to hear someone of his status and experience roll up their figurative sleeves and pummel a project into submission, which happened fairly regularly over the course of his distinguished career.
Plenty of features have been on the receiving end of a thumbs down from Ebert, but only a select few have been dismantled piece by piece and then stomped upon. There’s an argument to be made that maybe it’s better to be objectively bad than entirely forgettable, but let’s just hope the filmmakers didn’t read these reviews.
There’s no shortage of titles to have been taken to task by Ebert over the decades, but these ten stand out as his most scathing by far.
Roger Ebert’s 10 most scathing reviews:
10. Catwoman (Pitof, 2004)
Despite being a certifiable box office bomb that failed to recoup its $100million budget at the box office and a Golden Raspberry Award winner for ‘Worst Picture’, ‘Worst Director’, ‘Worst Actress’, and ‘Worst Screenplay’, Halle Berry’s Catwoman would nonetheless reign as the highest-grossing superhero movie with a female lead for 13 years until Wonder Woman came along.
Easily among the worst comic book adaptations of all time, it’s unsurprising that Ebert was less than impressed by what he saw. Calling it “a movie about Halle Berry’s beauty, sex appeal, figure, eyes, lips and costume design,” he does at least admit it gets those aspects correct. Everything else, not so much.
Mononym director Pitof takes the brunt, with Ebert remarking that “the director was probably issued with two names at birth and would be wise to use the other one on his next project.” He wasn’t best pleased with Catwoman “inspiring our almost unseemly gratitude for her cleavage,” either, which was a key part of the costume for reasons that assuredly weren’t practical.
9. Taste of Cherry (Abbas Kiarostami, 1997)
A minimalist Iranian drama doesn’t immediately jump out as a film Ebert would have serious issues with, but his assessment of Taste of Cherry was scathing. As hard as he tried to analyse it with impartiality, he couldn’t reconcile with just how uninteresting he found it to be.
As Ebert put it: “A case can be made for the movie, but it would involve transforming the experience of viewing the film (which is excruciatingly boring) into something more interesting, a fable about life and death.” He wasn’t sold on that interpretation, though, asking the rhetorical question of “Is Taste of Cherry a worthwhile viewing experience? I say it is not.”
The story follows a man intent on killing himself who looks for someone to bury him in the aftermath. While Ebert acknowledged the courage it took for an Iranian filmmaker to tackle a subject such as suicide, the word most heavily repeated in his review is “boring”, which sums up his sentiment.
8. Battlefield Earth (Roger Christian, 2000)
It’s mind-blowing to think that John Travolta was so misguidedly confident in Battlefield Earth‘s potential that he initially sought out Quentin Tarantino to direct, only to end up with the guy who shot second unit on The Phantom Menace instead, who promptly delivered a bomb so hefty it led to a fraud lawsuit that sank an entire production company.
Anointed by Ebert as akin to “taking a bus trip with someone who has needed a bath for a long time,” the calamitous sci-fi caper is deemed “unpleasant in a hostile way”. The critic’s entirely true opinion blasts Battlefield Earth as “awful in so many different ways,” and even turned out to be prophetic after completely accurately branding it as “a film that for decades to come will be the punch line of jokes about bad movies.”
7. Camille 2000 (Radley Metzger, 1969)
The feature-length adaptation of the novel La Dame aux Camélias, which was then turned into a successful play, the relatively flimsy narrative of Camille 2000 follows Daniele Gaubert’s Marguerite Gautier and her hedonistic lifestyle, with Ebert unloading both barrels on director Radley Metzger in particular.
Mocking the filmmaker for saying he’d seen John Huston’s The Treasure of the Sierra Madre 103 times, he was unequivocal “that was not enough”. He barely even saw it as a film at all, venting about the advertising that encapsulated its one-note construction: “Camille 2000 is shot in colour. It is dubbed into English instead of subtitled. It is widescreen. It has a pretty girl in it,” he ranted. “Whoever painted that big sign in front of the theatre has an accurate critical sense. The sign says: ‘See Daniele Gaubert presented in the nude and with great frequency.’ That captures the essence of Metzger’s art.”
6. The Deathmaster (Ray Danton, 1972)
A shoestring schlock who finds a mysterious stranger turns his cult-like following of hippies into vampires isn’t intended to be high art. But as far as Ebert was concerned, that was no excuse for just how turgid The Deathmaster turned out to be.
“Pretty routine” barely masked the apathy he held for the movie, especially one sequence that featured the same location being obviously reused over and over again: “I counted seven chases down the same length of subterranean cavern. It is not a very long length, but what they do is photograph a guy running down it one way, and then cut to the other end of the same passage and have him run back.”
In his view, that means “it looks twice as long as it is, which is how the movie feels”. Branding the characters “so dumb they have had to learn to speak the English language by watching old AIP exploitation movies” and calling the dialogue “eight years out of date” makes it pretty clear he’s not a fan.
5. The Village (M. Night Shyamalan, 2004)
M. Night Shyamalan’s twist endings have been used repeatedly as a stick to beat him over the head across the course of a rug-pulling career, but it’s debatable as to whether anyone detested the polarising ending of The Village more than Ebert.
In addition to using such glowing terms as “a colossal miscalculation” with “a flimsy excuse for a plot” packed with characters “who move below the one-dimensional,” he was so offended by the finale that he trashed it as an affront to grammar itself: “To call it an anti-climax would be an insult not only to climaxes but to prefixes. It’s a crummy secret, about one step up the ladder of narrative originality from It Was All a Dream,” he raged. “It’s so witless, in fact, that when we do discover the secret, we want to rewind the film so we don’t know the secret anymore.”
4. Last Rites (Donald P. Bellisario, 1988)
The one and only feature film written and directed by Donald P. Bellisario, Ebert’s takedown of Last Rites, may indicate why the famed small-screen producer never even considered taking on another movie project.
Not only named as his least favourite of 1988, Ebert even took the time to explain why: “It is not only bad filmmaking, but it is offensive as well – offensive to my intelligence”. He furthered that despite the fact that “many films are bad, only a few declare themselves the work of people deficient in taste, judgment, reason, tact, morality and common sense,” and this was one of them.
Looking at the big picture, he asked: “Was there no one connected with this project who read the screenplay, considered the story, evaluated the proposed film and vomited?” Clearly, there was not, but suffice it to say, the preposterous crime thriller left a bad taste in the mouth.
3. North (Rob Reiner, 1994)
Ebert’s hatred of Rob Reiner’s North has become the stuff of legend, notably because he held the filmmaker in great esteem for a back catalogue that had been largely acclaimed and massively successful up until that point.
Taking the gloves off, the critic completely and utterly eviscerated the misguided comedy on every single imaginable level: “I hated this movie. Hated hated hated hated hated this movie. Hated it. Hated every simpering stupid vacant audience-insulting moment of it,” he vented. “Hated the sensibility that thought anyone would like it. Hated the implied insult to the audience by its belief that anyone would be entertained by it.” With that in mind, it’s safe to assume he hated it.
2. Caligula (Tinto Brass, 1979)
One of the most controversial movies of all time that faced plenty of backlash over its violence and sexual content, Ebert decried Caligula as “sickening, utterly worthless, shameful trash.” Released in many re-edited, abridged, and uncensored forms, it may have become something of a cult classic, but he’s not interested.
Kicking it while it was already down, he then carried on tearing Caligula to shreds: “This film is not only garbage on an artistic level but that it is also garbage on the crude and base level where it no doubt hopes to find its audience.” Failing on three fronts, he stated in no uncertain terms that “Caligula is not good art, it is not good cinema, and it is not good porn.” Echoing the opinion of a woman who saw it at the same time he did, Ebert agrees that the film is “the worst piece of shit I have ever seen.”
1. Freddy Got Fingered (Tom Green, 2001)
Tom Green’s relentlessly absurd jet-black comedy is another title to have found increasing appreciation as a cult classic, but Ebert simply would not be moved, with the bottom of the barrel not even a place where Freddy Got Fingered should consider itself welcome.
Frankly illustrating his point, Ebert went straight for the jugular: “This movie doesn’t scrape the bottom of the barrel. This movie isn’t the bottom of the barrel. This movie isn’t below the bottom of the barrel. This movie doesn’t deserve to be mentioned in the same sentence with barrels.” Barrels aside, it wasn’t strictly considered a feature, either, but more a “vomitorium consisting of 93 minutes.”
