The “stupefying dimwitted” movie Roger Ebert hated with a passion: “Such crap”
Sometimes you read a movie review so caustic that it makes you wonder if the filmmaker personally wronged the critic in some way. Roger Ebert’s evisceration of a 2009 ‘comedy’ (using that term very loosely) certainly falls into this category.
It’s comical to imagine Ebert, one of the finest critics in the history of American cinema, settling down into his cinema seat, notepad in hand, to watch a film whose director previously made cinematic atrocities like Van Wilder: Party Liaison and Wild Hogs. Those movies were laugh-free zones, and Ebert must have wondered who he pissed off in a past life to be subjected to such a director’s latest offering.
The synopsis of Old Dogs won’t have filled Ebert with much confidence, either, even if its cast offered slim glimmers of hope. A movie starring John Travolta, Robin Williams, and Matt Dillon couldn’t be all bad, he likely thought, before that light sense of hope began to be dimmed by the film’s lame, misguided attempts at mirth.
Playing a pair of business partners who are trying to seal a big deal with a group of Japanese businessmen, all while tasked with looking after two six-year-old twins, Travolta and Williams look mortified from almost the first minute. So mortified, in fact, that Ebert lamented their thinking behind signing up for the film in the first place.
“Apparently, their agents weren’t perceptive enough to smell the screenplay in its advanced state of decomposition,” he witheringly noted, clearly disappointed in both stars. “You’ve paid too many dues to get involved with such crap at this stage in your careers.”
Over the course of the next mercifully brief 88 minutes, Ebert watched in creeping horror as Williams spouted dialogue that would make Disney Channel writers cringe, and crash-landed in a pond four separate times while trying to master a jet pack. Then, when vertically challenged co-star Seth Green found himself in the clutches of a bear, he mugged for the camera while quietly singing a lullaby to soothe the great beast – clearly a stuntman in a bear costume – to sleep.
While that scene aggravated Ebert due to its total inability to raise a laugh, he also took umbrage with the movie’s insistence on making short jokes at Green’s expense. “Seth Green is not a tall man,” Ebert conceded through gritted teeth. “But hell, he’s only three inches shorter than Williams. In this movie, you’d think Green was Danny DeVito.”
Picturing Ebert trudging out of the cinema, his mind swimming with all the ways Old Dogs just insulted the art of cinema, is easy, and I can only assume he filed his review while he was still incandescent with rage. How else can you explain a critic as erudite as him dubbing the film “stupefying dimwitted” instead of the correct spelling “stupefyingly dimwitted”? The man was angry.
Ultimately, Old Dogs may have been the rare film that prompted Ebert to long for the sweet release of death – metaphorically speaking -because he made a joke in his write-up that was in uncharacteristically questionable taste. “The release of Old Dogs was delayed from April until now because of the death of another of its co-stars, Bernie Mac,” Ebert noted witheringly. “I can think of another way that they might have respected his memory.” Savage.
