The “singularly stupid” movie character Roger Ebert hated with a passion: “Boring, as well”
If there’s one thing that can instantly make a bad movie even worse, it’s an annoying protagonist. Cinemagoers are willing to overlook shortcomings in plot and common sense if there’s at least an engaging character leading the line, but Roger Ebert found one so-called ‘hero’ so off-putting it soured him on a film he wasn’t enjoying anyway.
Many of cinema’s all-time classics have suffered from a similar problem, so an interminable exploration of what happens when somebody earns their 15 minutes of fame from the most unlikely circumstances didn’t really stand a chance, especially when the script was wafer-thin and the narrative anchor was a bit of a twat.
Director Jefery Levy’s 1994 black comedy SFW had potential on paper. After all, it was a time when the cult of celebrity was beginning to sink its hooks into American culture, and the 24-hour news cycle threw up a new headline-grabber almost daily, so it wasn’t the worst idea in the world for a feature.
Stephen Dorff’s Cliff Spab finds himself caught up in a hostage situation that ends up lasting for weeks, and when he’s finally freed, his complete disinterest in spending so long under pain of death makes him a cultural sensation, with viewers enthralled by his nihilism, and the film’s title derived from his rallying cry of “So fucking what?”
However, an enticing premise doesn’t compensate for a lacklustre end product. Ebert began his one-star review by saying SFW is a movie so dumb that “it qualifies Forrest Gump for a genius grant.” It’s a harsh way to begin his analysis, but he immediately one-upped himself by taking Dorff’s Spab to the cleaners.
“It is the portrait of the most singularly stupid, obnoxious character I’ve seen on the screen in many a day,” he wrote. “Which would be promising if he were not boring as well.” Even though the character is entirely fictitious, Ebert hated him so much that it came across as awfully personal.
“He is culturally deprived, has a low IQ, is narcissistic and alcoholic, and has one of those vocabularies in which the most popular four-letter word is used as an all-purpose substitute for thousands of other words unknown to the speaker.” While a lot of the blame should rest on Levy and co-writer Danny Rubin’s shoulders for that, it doesn’t help that Dorff fails to make Spab even remotely likeable.
SFW clearly had designs on making its central figure one of those people audiences gravitated towards as the epitome of cool and reflective of current societal sentiments. Unfortunately, those kinds of characters can’t be manufactured or precision-engineered, and Ebert knew it.
As he opined, “The sayings of Cliff Spab will not soon be anthologised in those books of great movie lines.” At one point, Dorff even tries to emulate one of the coolest cats in cinema history, but as Ebert put it, “the movie gives no evidence that he has ever heard of Marlon Brando, or anyone else.”
The film was roundly panned by critics and tanked at the box office, and even though bad movies release in cinemas all the time, Ebert held a particular disdain for SFW because he abhorred Spab so much.
