Roger Ebert on the one movie he simply couldn’t imagine ever wanting to see: “Incompetent”
During the course of his career as a film critic, Roger Ebert watched many bad movies. The nature of his job meant that sometimes he had no choice but to sit through genuinely awful movies, forcing himself to get to the end – that’s if he hadn’t fallen asleep or rolled his eyes too far into the back of his head first.
Yet, some of Ebert’s most entertaining movie reviews were the ones he absolutely despised, such as The Brown Bunny, which led to a hilarious feud with Vincent Gallo, or Freddy Got Fingered, which he labelled as worse than “below the bottom of the barrel”.
He went as far as to say, “This movie doesn’t deserve to be mentioned in the same sentence with barrels.”
Clearly, Ebert was never afraid to speak his mind, writing comically and honestly about the newest releases. In 1997, a film was released that he truly couldn’t comprehend—an Alan Smithee Film: Burn Hollywood Burn. The movie was a box office and critical disaster, with the plot coming to mirror the movie’s real-life production.
The name Alan Smithee was previously used in Hollywood as a pseudonym for directors who wanted to have their name removed from a film. This was typically the case when a movie ended up turning out so bad that the only thing they could do was pretend they’d never worked on it. In An Alan Smithee Film: Burn Hollywood Burn, Eric Idle plays a director who was actually born with the name Alan Smithee. Using a mockumentary style, the movie follows a disastrous film production, with many big stars featuring in the film, from Whoopi Goldberg and Sylvester Stallone to Ryan O’Neal and Jackie Chan.
However, with Harvey Weinstein also playing a prominent role, if that wasn’t a sign that the film was doomed, we don’t know what was. When the movie was ready for release, the director, Arthur Hiller, known for The Tiger Makes Out and Love Story, was not happy with the finished result. Thus, he decided to use the Alan Smithee name himself – very ironic.
Ebert had the pleasure of sitting through the awful movie, which won five Golden Raspberry Awards. He described it as a “spectacularly bad film – incompetent, unfunny, ill-conceived, badly executed, lamely written, and acted by people who look trapped in the headlights.”
He added, “Have you ever been to one of those office parties where the PR department has put together a tribute to a retiring boss? That’s how this film plays. It has no proper storyline. No dramatic scenes.” Ebert also suggested that actors like Stallone and Chan “play themselves as if they are celebrity impersonators.”
To Ebert, this was a film that was impossible to save. “One is accustomed to seeing bad movies, but not incompetent ones. Sophomores in a film class could make a better film than this.” He even went as far as to say, “On the basis of what’s on the screen I cannot, frankly, imagine any version of this film that I would want to see. The only way to save this film would be to trim 86 minutes.”
