The “sad, cruel” movie Roger Ebert wished he’d never seen: “Why do I have to watch this?”
In what won’t come as a shock to anyone, the job of a movie critic is to watch and review movies. Roger Ebert did it for longer than most, and gained plenty of fame along the way, but even he was left to question his career path when being subjected to a film he couldn’t stand.
Everyone has sat down and watched something they immediately regret sitting down and watching, but the benefit most people have is that they can switch it off to save themselves the hassle. Ebert wasn’t in that position, and he slugged his way through some amount of shite during his distinguished career.
While he was never particularly biased toward one genre or against another, it became clear that he wasn’t the biggest fan of horror. He dished out countless scathing assessments of slashers, torture porn flicks, and supernatural terrors, making it the medium most likely to get him on board unless it was something special.
Writer and director Edward Anderson’s 2008 effort, Shuttle, wasn’t one of them. Peyton List and Cameron Goodman catch the titular airport bus after returning home from a Mexican holiday, only to discover that Tony Curran’s driver has sinister motivations and ulterior motives, dragging them into the worst night of their lives.
Ebert was never sold on exploitative horror, and his one-star review of Shuttle began with him questioning its existence. “Why do I have to watch this movie?” he asked. “Why does anyone? What was the impulse behind this sad, cruel story? Is there, as they say, ‘an audience for it’? I guess so.”
What really stuck in his craw was the treatment of Shuttle‘s two leads, which he categorised as increasingly “disturbing” as the story progressed. “The film seems set up to empower women,” he mused. “I won’t say more about the plot, except that it leads to hopelessness and evil,” which doesn’t sound very empowering, especially if you’ve got any idea of how the movie ends. Spoiler: it’s not uplifting.
Ebert did at least think it was competently made, although there was a caveat: “Do images have no qualities other than their technical competence?” Not in Shuttle‘s case, from where he was sitting. He conceded that while there’s an inevitability to relatively inexperienced directors starting in the arena of blood, guts, and thrills, he had a suggestion for sophomore filmmaker Anderson.
“I know the horror genre is a traditional port of entry for first-time directors on low budgets, and I suppose that is Anderson’s purpose,” he wrote. “All right, he has proven himself. Now let him be less passionately infatuated with despair.” You couldn’t make it up, but Shuttle remains the last notable feature he directed, so Ebert didn’t even get that satisfaction.
Nihilism was all the rage in mid-2000s horror when putting characters through the most horrific experiences possible, and not even letting them get a happy ending was a standard practice. Shuttle was merely one of a thousand examples, and while it clearly wasn’t the best, it wasn’t the worst either, even if Ebert hated it.
