Three beloved movies Roger Ebert hated with a passion: “Likely to be disturbing to small children”
In life, two things can often be true at the same time. Take Roger Ebert, for example. He was arguably the best American film critic in history, but simultaneously, he also hated a lot of really, really great movies.
Over the course of his storied career writing for the Chicago Sun-Times and presenting Siskel & Ebert At the Movies, the critic gave scathing verdicts on some truly stunning pieces of filmmaking. A handful of the undisputed classics that Ebert ran through with his critical sword were A Clockwork Orange (“an ideological mess”), The Usual Suspects (“To the degree that I do understand, I don’t care”), Blue Velvet (“Pulls itself apart”), and Gladiator (“muddy, fuzzy and indistinct”).
These reviews, and others like them, have already become infamous in internet circles, so this article will look at three other beloved films Ebert dismissed whose reviews aren’t as well-known. These movies mightn’t be on the level of Kubrick or Lynch, but they were all hugely successful pictures that people still keep dear to their hearts. Well, people that weren’t named ‘Roger Ebert’, that is.
First up to be gleefully taken to task by Ebert is Ace Ventura: Pet Detective, the comedy blockbuster that shot a certain rubber-faced comedic hurricane to superstardom. It would take a churlish person to watch Ace Ventura, the story of a cartoonish animal-obsessed sleuth, and not giggle a few times, at the very least. Hell, the scene in which Jim Carrey acts out a football action replay, including a truly inspired piece where he contorts his limbs to seemingly move in reverse, is worth the price of admission alone. Not to Ebert, though.
In his one-star review, Ebert complained, “Carrey plays Ace as if he’s being clocked on an Energy-O-Meter, and paid by the calories expended.” This is far from a negative when it comes to Carrey; in fact, it’s his USP. Sadly, Ebert wasn’t on the guy’s wavelength, and he argued the film only had one joke (“Ace Ventura’s weird nerdy strangeness”), which is categorically false, as Ventura is only two of those three things. He couldn’t be a nerd, because he bags Courteney Cox! Come on, Rog, get it together.
Moving from one hyperactive comedic whirlwind to another, Ebert was by no means a fan of Robin Williams’ Jumanji, which he slapped with a one and a half star rating. This time, Ebert was on strangely pearl-clutching form, coming across like a shrieking Helen Lovejoy from The Simpsons during one of her, “Won’t somebody please think of the children?!” meltdowns. “Whoever thought this was a family movie…must think kids are made of stern stuff,” Ebert groused about a film an entire generation of children love implicitly. “The film is a gloomy special-effects extravaganza filled with grotesque images, generating fear and despair.”
This reaction to Jumanji, a movie that pushes ‘scaring the kiddies’ no further than Ghostbusters before it, is odd, but for whatever reason, the CGI jungle ‘terrors’ featured here really rubbed him the wrong way. He particularly hated when young Peter, the little brother of Kirsten Dunst’s character, was transformed into a monkey, because he thought the image was “likely to be disturbing to small children”. In fact, he even claimed it was “gratuitous cruelty on the part of the filmmakers toward the harmless young character.” Maybe he just watched the film in a rotten mood?
Finally, and most egregiously, Ebert didn’t like Beetlejuice. As in, he didn’t like Tim Burton’s 1988 supernatural comedy as a whole, but also felt that Michael Keaton’s performance as the Ghost with the Most made the movie worse. I could barely even type those words, so stunned was I to read Ebert’s withering take on Keaton’s turn in the movie, which is surely one of the greatest displays of sheer movie star magnetism and take-no-prisoners character creation in modern cinema history.
“One of the problems is Keaton, as the exorcist,” Ebert wrote in a two-star review. “Nearly unrecognisable behind pounds of makeup, he prances around playing Betelgeuse as a mischievous and vindictive prankster.” Once again, Ebert seemed to hit the nail on the head, just like with Carrey as Ace Ventura. Yes, Beetlejuice is a mischievous and vindictive prankster, and yes, Keaton is supposed to be transformed by the grotesquely silly makeup. Amazingly, Ebert just didn’t see these things as positives.
Ultimately, Ebert noted that he liked Beetlejuice better when it focused on Geena Davis and Alec Baldwin’s married couple, and wished the movie retained their “sweet romanticism” instead of turning into “a sitcom fueled by lots of special effects.” Then he called Keaton’s appearances “mostly a nuisance,” which befuddles my brain in a truly profound way. I don’t even know what to say anymore.
