Why Quentin Tarantino hates Bill Murray’s best movies: “An iconoclastic pain in the ass”
From the early 1980s to the mid-1990s, Bill Murray cemented himself as one of Hollywood’s marquee comedy stars by playing major roles in a number of critical darlings, cult classics, and box office smash hits that have stood the test of time and remain as popular as ever.
The Saturday Night Live alum always felt destined for silver screen stardom, and that became increasingly true once he started bringing his signature acerbic deadpan stylings to the multiplex, with Caddyshack laying down a marker that Murray’s movie career was heading straight for the very top.
Within the space of a decade and a half, the ‘Murricane’ had lent his name to Ivan Reitman’s withering Stripes, the same director’s seminal supernatural favourite Ghostbusters, Richard Donner’s blackly hilarious festive staple Scrooged, the entertainingly unsettling What About Bob?, timeless time loop caper Groundhog Day, and the Farrelly brothers’ Kingpin.
One of the major recurring themes of Murray’s star vehicles was that he’d be introduced in the narrative as – for want of a better term – a bit of a dick before his character learns important lessons along the way and winds up as a better man by the time the credits roll. It’s a standard storytelling technique that can’t be argued with in terms of how popular those flicks are and the money they made, but Quentin Tarantino can’t stand the template.
In a manner not dissimilar to how he once suggested he wasn’t singling out Ryan Reynolds for criticism before immediately singling out Ryan Reynolds for criticism, Tarantino’s larger issue was with the redemption arc in general, but it was Murray who caught the brunt of his fury.
“If you make a movie about a fucking bastard, you could bet that fucking bastard would see the error of their ways and be redeemed in the last 20 minutes,” he wrote in Cinema Speculation. “Like, for example, all of Bill Murray’s characters.”
“How does Murray in Stripes go from being an iconoclastic pain in the ass, who deserves to get beat up by Drill Sergeant Warren Oates, to rallying the troops (‘That’s the fact, Jack!) and masterminding a covert mission on foreign soil? And Stripes was one of the hip movies,” the two-time Academy Award winner’s rant continued.
Tarantino despised the fact that in Murray’s filmography, particularly the aforementioned Stripes, Scrooged, and Groundhog Day, the protagonist’s redemption served as the backbone of the entire story, going so far as to say he’s “always rejected the idea that Bill Murray’s characters needed redemption.”
His biggest bugbear is a completely rhetorical one, though, with Tarantino asking if anybody thought a less sarcastic Bill Murray was a better Bill Murray. He obviously didn’t think so, but based on the enduring popularity of his most famous films, there’s no shortage of viewers who’d disagree with the Pulp Fiction director’s hot take.
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