The Bruce Willis movie Roger Ebert hated with a passion: “An assault on the human desire to be entertained”
You didn’t ever want to get on Roger Ebert’s bad side. The beloved film critic had a legendary knack for language, turning his skills to the lyrically rapturous when he loved a movie and utterly withering when he didn’t. He was, above all, a passionate defender of cinema, and when he felt that a film failed to live up to its potential or fell back on tired clichés, he wasted no time telling his vast readership about it.
There were many films that Ebert disliked. He referred to Tom Green’s 2001 comedy Freddy Got Fingered as a “vomitorium” that scraped below the bottom of the barrel and dismissed the Elijah Wood comedy North as “one of the most thoroughly hateful movies in recent years” (Wood was a young child at the time).
However, these criticisms were all levelled at fringe movies that made little impact at the box office. The fact that Ebert despised them with every fibre of his being had more to do with their intrinsic failings than with his personal opinion, and he was hardly alone in his scathing estimations. The same cannot be said of all his reviews. In 1998, the critic excoriated a film that would become the second highest-grossing movie of the year behind Titanic.
“Here it is at last, the first 150-minute trailer,” he wrote at the beginning of his review for Michael Bay’s Armageddon. Starring Bruce Willis as a manly oil driller who loves America and hates his daughter’s boyfriend, the film was one of those operatic disaster movies that were wildly popular in the leadup to the new millennium. Independence Day, Twister, and Dante’s Peak had already been released, and, as usual, Michael Bay was more than happy to rehash old territory with his own original addition of bad taste.
Bruce Willis was essentially reprising his Die Hard role of John McClane in the film, but there is none of the charm or endearing resourcefulness of his previous character. Instead, he’s pure misogynistic bravado and patriotic cliché. He may as well have started every scene waving an American flag, cocking a gun, and spanking an unnamed female character on the ass.
“The movie is an assault on the eyes, the ears, the brain, common sense and the human desire to be entertained,” Ebert wrote. “No matter what they’re charging to get in, it’s worth more to get out.”
The fact that it reached the second spot at the box office is not surprising in light of the total domination that Marvel movies have enjoyed recently, but it wasn’t even the second-best disaster movie of the year. Deep Impact had been released earlier in 1998. Featuring a nearly identical set-up of a celestial object hurtling toward Earth and threatening to wipe out humanity, it took a much darker, more harrowing and fatalistic approach to the premise.
At the time, audiences were much more eager to watch gauzy disaster schlock over a film that showed, in horrifying detail, what the end of the world might actually look like, but Armageddon has only gotten worse with age, and Deep Impact remains, to its credit, a deeply scarring viewing experience.
