The Good, The Bad and The Multiplex

by Mark Kermode

  A few weeks later, Kim and I went to a preview screening of the cartoony vampire-slayer romp Priest in 3-D, which I was really looking forward to because, just as with Richard Gere, I have a bit of a thing for Paul Bettany. The film turned out to be a major disappointment – noisy, empty and (worst of all) not a patch on Bettany’s previous collaboration with director Scott Stewart, the splendidly silly Legion. Despite the fact that it attracted almost universally stinky reviews I had enjoyed the hell out of Legion, in which Bettany plays a renegade archangel who hacks off his wings and picks up an Uzi in defiance of a God who is waxing wroth and then some. Set in a roadside cafe in the middle of the desert, that film had a sparky comic-book wit and featured excitingly diverting set pieces in which the possessed minions of the apocalypse are mown down by the kind of heavy artillery fire sorely missing from the Book of Revelation. (When it comes to the Bible, it’s all slings and swords and plagues of beasts and boils, but there’s a notable shortage of intercontinental ballistic missiles with massive atomic warheads, which is a shame.) Judged alongside the comparably themed Keanu Reeves dud Constantine (similarly ridiculed by most mainstream critics, but an entirely different beast), Legion really held its own. And it was way more fun than the overblown guns-and-religion Schwarzenegger smash-’em-up End of Days, in which Arnie attempts to redeem the human race by shooting and punching devils in the face. So, within its own admittedly rarified subgenre, Legion was a hit in my book.

  Anyway, as we sat down to watch Priest I mentioned to Kim in passing that I had recently been asked a specific question about Saw V (which was rubbish) and was ashamed to admit that I couldn’t recall a single scene that I could positively identify as being from that particular episode, as opposed to any of the other six instalments. ‘Ah,’ replied Kim sympathetically, ‘I have the same problem with Saw IV. I can tell you something specific about all the rest of the Saw movies but I can’t remember a single distinctive thing about Saw IV. It really bothers me …’

  The fact that it bothered Kim is what makes him such a great critic, and I half expected him to scurry home and watch Saw IV (which is rubbish) all over again just to fill in that gap in his otherwise all-encompassing knowledge. And it’s precisely because of this dedication to the cause that I’d rather hear what Kim has to say on the subject of Saw 3D than someone who hasn’t religiously ploughed their way through the rest of the series first.

  In fact, if you just hold on a minute, I’ll give him a call right now and get his verdict.

  Ring ring.

  ‘Kim Newman.’ (He always answers the phone like that.)

  ‘Hi, Kim. It’s Mark.’

  ‘Oh, hi.’

  ‘I just wanted to check something. What did you think of Saw 3D?’

  ‘Disappointingly flat.’

  ‘Great, thanks. Bye!’

  Click.

  The fact that both Kim (who knows loads about horror films) and some bloke down the pub could come to the same overall conclusion about the relative merits of Saw 3D (it’s rubbish) is neither surprising nor ultimately important. Opinions are like arseholes: everyone’s got one, and everyone thinks theirs is the only one that doesn’t stink. What’s important is the context in which the opinion was reached and the manner in which it is expressed. This is the difference between film criticism and pub talk. Pub talk can be all opinion and nothing else; film criticism, if it is done properly, should involve opinion, description, contextualisation, analysis and (if you’re lucky) entertainment. These are the five essential ingredients of a ‘proper’ film review, and they are what separate the bedroom ramblings of somebody writing about movies for no one’s amusement but their own and the published reports of someone (like Kim) for whom film criticism is a lifelong vocation.

  To illustrate these essential elements, here are five short reviews of Saw 3D, each one adding another key ingredient:

  1) Opinion:

  Saw 3D is rubbish.

  2) Opinion and description:

  Saw 3D is a horror film that is rubbish.

  3) Opinion, description and contextualisation:

  Saw 3D is the seventh episode and the first stereoscopic instalment in a long-running horror series, and it is rubbish.

  4) Opinion, description, contextualisation and analysis:

  Saw 3D is the first stereoscopic instalment in a series that began life as a tortuously inventive low-budget chiller but which has descended over the course of six sequels into gory, boring torture porn which is rubbish.

  5) Opinion, description, contextualisation, analysis and entertainment:

  It took the once-inventive but increasingly depressing Saw series seven movies to resort to the hackneyed headache of 3-D, but despite the promise that this is ‘The Final Chapter’ (just wait until the sums say otherwise) you keep wishing those protruding spikes would leap a little further out of the screen and puncture your eyeballs to ensure that you never have to watch rubbish like this ever again.

  OK, so that last example wasn’t particularly entertaining, but I never said that I was any good at marshalling the five essential elements of proper film criticism, merely that I could identify them. Kim did it more pithily and came up with a better joke. The best joke I ever heard about the Saw series was from a listener to my Radio 5 Live film review show who had gone to a 7 p.m. multiplex screening of the fifth instalment (the one about which I couldn’t remember a single distinguishing feature) and had taken great delight in being able to stride up to the ticket office and demand: ‘One to see Saw Five in Six at Seven.’ This began a long-running theme that found listeners seemingly planning their entire evening’s entertainment on the basis of a numerical pun such as ‘One to 3-D Thor in Five at Six’, which I found ludicrously entertaining.

  But to the point: what’s important about these five golden rules is that all of them relate to one’s duty either to the reader or oneself, and none of them take account of any possible debt to the film in question. An early editor of Empire magazine is reported to have told his aspiring critics always to remember that ‘these people [film-makers] are not your friends’, that critics should owe their allegiance to no one but the reader. Inevitably, this has proved a hard rule to follow because the kind of access to the stars that shifts magazines can swiftly be withdrawn in the face of harshly honest criticism. But despite the flimsy illusion of glamour, the truth is that being a film critic really has nothing to do with being liked, and even less to do with being a ‘friend of the stars’. People constantly ask me if I know such-and-such a star or whether I hang out with some film-maker or other, and the answer is almost invariably ‘No’. The reason is simple: if done properly film criticism should maintain a safe distance from film-making because, just as good taste is the enemy of art, so intimacy and cosiness are the enemies of honest criticism. In an ideal world, film critics would have no friends amongst the film-making fraternity. In fact they would probably have no friends, full stop. Nor would they nurture any ambition to become film-makers themselves.

  Nope, a good film critic should, by their very nature, be the kind of person who would get thrown off movie sets, and thrown out of movie industry parties – an unwanted outsider to whom nothing is owed and from whom nothing is expected by the people who actually make movies. So, when a Z-list British ‘actor’ and ‘personality’ recently became the latest in a long line of affronted luvvies to threaten to beat me up for mocking his rotten films, I felt a sense of pride that I was still able to provoke such a violent reaction. This is just part of the job: if you’re honest about the parlous state of some movies, then you have to be ready for the people who make those movies to start bleating about how they’re going to kick your head in for being mean and disrespectful about their craft. In this particular case, said affrontee actually devoted three whole pages of his newly published autobiography to repeating his widely viewed YouTube promise to ‘put something right across [my] faakin canister’ for laughing at his risible Dick Van Dire cockney-geezer shtick. It’s a threat h
e continues to repeat ad nauseam; even as I write, I see Dick has once again told the press that he will headbutt me and break my ‘faakin nose’ because I ‘don’t take [him] seriously as an actor’.

  Actually, I don’t take him seriously, full stop.

  Luvvies are like this, even the mockney ones. To be fair, this particular drug-snorting Groucho-club habitué (who has ‘done Pinter and stuff like that’) was probably upset at having recently torched his career by publicly advising a fan to cut his ex-girlfriend’s face (a joke, apparently – ha ha ha), thereby becoming the only person ever to get fired from Zoo magazine for being too sexist – quite a feat. This faux pas had irreparably damaged his box-office appeal, with his most recent movie attracting only 24 punters on its opening weekend in UK cinemas, grossing a record-breakingly pitiful sum of £205. So, presumably he was cross and wanted to blame someone for his professional misfortunes, and in such circumstances the easiest person to blame is always a critic. This despite the fact that, according to that YouGov poll, no one pays any attention to critics in the first place.

  This is a familiar pattern: an actor or film-maker shoots themselves in the foot with a really rubbish movie and then runs around blaming the critics, to whom no one listens anyway. In 2009, the usually jovial Kevin Smith directed an inept buddy-cop action-comedy called Cop Out, which featured Bruce Willis phoning in his laziest performance to date. The movie, which began life with the altogether saucier title A Couple of Dicks, was (as you might have guessed) rubbish, and I paid £7.50 to watch it in a cinema with five other people, all of whom had also paid and all of whom also remained stony-faced throughout. The reason I had paid to see the film rather than catching it at a free critics-only preview screening was because Kevin Smith (whose work I have enjoyed and championed in the past) had taken to the internet to complain about over-privileged critics seeing his films for free and then unfairly rubbishing them in public.

  As with so many of his internet ramblings (and indeed several of his recent movies), Smith’s complaint was scattershot, sloppy and – to be honest – somewhat lacking in the humour department. But it garnered international attention after respected American critic Roger Ebert issued an equally irate riposte, prompting a public spat that generated variously misleading internet reports (shockingly, such things exist) about Smith having declared war on critics, and critics duly circling the wagons and closing ranks.

  What Smith actually said was that the critics who were enthusiastically sticking the boot into Cop Out were applying unfairly highbrow critical standards to what was essentially a fluffy piece of fun. After all, the movie wasn’t called Schindler’s Cop Out, now was it? (Smith’s words, not mine.) So why were people complaining that it was stupid, empty-headed trash, when that was exactly what it was meant to be? He went further, comparing the howls of derision that had greeted preview screenings of the film to the schoolyard bullying of a disabled child. His exact words (and I encourage you to check the veracity of this quote for yourself because it sounds like I must be making this up) were: ‘Writing a nasty review for Cop Out is akin to bullying a retarded kid who was getting a couple of chuckles from the normies by singing AFTERNOON DELIGHT … All you’ve done is make fun of something that wasn’t doing you any harm and wanted only to give some cats some fun laughs.’

  It’s hard to know where to begin in unpicking this silliness. Let’s start by imagining the shrieking indignation that would surely have ensued if a critic had had the poor taste to liken Smith’s movie (which the director ought to have known was not up to snuff) to a ‘retarded kid’. Said critic would have been promptly hounded out of a job by everyone from indignant film-makers to rightfully outraged equal-opportunity campaigners. Yet the director managed to do just this, whilst simultaneously complaining about all the other bad things that critics had said about his clearly sub-par film. Nor was it a slip of the tongue. Several months after Cop Out had finished ‘underperforming’ in theatres, Smith could still be found proudly rolling out the same ill-considered simile, telling MovieWeb (for example) that ‘these dudes came at it like it was a retarded kid in class’.

  The nub of Smith’s argument (which is repeated endlessly in defence of the abysmal mainstream tosh that we are all apparently required to ‘celebrate’ in the name of fatuous inclusivity) was that the critics had no right to judge his film by their own unfairly highbrow standards, as if the movie required the support of a special-needs network in order for its true potential to be realised. Which is a bit rich considering that, at a cost of $37 million, Cop Out was hardly ‘underprivileged’ independent fare. On the contrary, it was a mid-priced studio movie with a star whose usual catering expenses could probably have covered several genuinely needy (and genuinely good) independent productions. Yet money (or the lack of it) swiftly became the central tenant of Smith’s complaint as he fell back on that old faithful mantra about critics not even paying to watch the movie – so, huh, what do they know?

  ‘Realized whole system’s upside down,’ he continued in his internet rant. ‘So we let a bunch of people see it for free and they shit all over it? Meanwhile, people who’d REALLY like to see the flick for free are made to pay? Bullshit: from now on, any flick I’m ever involved with, I conduct critics’ screenings thusly: you wanna see it early to review it? Fine: pay like you would if you saw it next week.’

  So I did. I skipped the free preview screening and paid to see Cop Out on its first Friday morning performance at the Vue cinema in Shepherds Bush, where it duly stank the place out. Honestly, I had more fun having back surgery. As far as I could tell, no one else in the cinema was enjoying it either, but just to be sure I sidled up to a lone saddo (like me) on the way out and muttered something about that being ‘the biggest load of bollocks I’ve seen in a while’. He nodded in agreement, made a vague grunting noise, and then turned on his mobile phone, which bizarrely played the theme tune from Beverly Hills Cop. Clearly, this was a guy who knew a decent mainstream buddy-cop comedy flick with a Harold Faltermeyer soundtrack when he saw one, and from what I could tell by his general demeanour he hadn’t just seen one. If he’d been in my shoes (i.e. if he’d been about to walk a few hundred yards up the road to Television Centre in order to go on air and tell the world what he thought of Cop Out) I don’t think he’d have been much kinder than I was.

  Sure enough, despite its megastar lead and prominent advertising campaign, Cop Out opened in the UK box office at number 12 – behind Furry Vengeance (then in its third week) – taking a measly £64,935 in 127 screens, while Werner Herzog’s altogether more oddball and adventurous Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans (which cost $10 million less) took £178,953 in 129 screens. So perhaps the snotnosed critics weren’t so out-of-step with popular taste after all.

  This kind of indignant strop is, of course, just the latest in a long line of film-maker tantrums that almost inevitably accompany the drubbing of a really poor film. And it will surely come as no surprise to learn that film-makers are far less inclined to complain about how awful critics are when their latest work is being hailed as the next Citizen Kane. Indeed, even when the notices are at very best moderate, film distributors still use critics to sell their product, often taking their words entirely out of context for use in print advertising to give the appearance of independent verification of value. For example, when reviewing the terribly ordinary 1992 romcom Jersey Girl (not to be confused with Kevin Smith’s terribly terrible 2004 rom(non)com of the same name) for London’s Time Out magazine, I noted in passing that, although the movie was a bit of a duffer, leading lady Jami Gertz was generally ‘a joy’. I meant this in contrast to leading man Dylan McDermott, whose performance was, frankly, plank-like. But when ads for the movie appeared, the phrase ‘A joy – Time Out’ was emblazoned beneath the movie’s title, thereby suggesting that this esteemed organ had given the film a whopping thumbs-up.

  This is business as usual; taking quotes out of context is common practice. My good friend Trevor Johnston once began a
review of the ropey erotic thriller Color of Night with the phrase ‘Hypnotic. Compelling. Stunning. Bruce Willis’ latest crime against celluloid is a special kind of bad’, only to find ads for the movie emblazoned with the words ‘Hypnotic. Compelling. Stunning – Time Out’. Similarly, when reviewing the Kirstie Alley comedy Sibling Rivalry, Nigel Floyd made it quite clear that he hated the movie. ‘From the moment Alley screws charming, grey-haired stranger Sam Elliot to death you know this is going to be a stiff,’ he wrote, with little room for misinterpretation. ‘As for the scene where she has to remove a condom from the corpse’s rigor mortised dick … Laugh? I almost changed my method of contraception.’ Imagine his surprise when ads for the movie appeared boldly emblazoned with the apparently laudatory phrase ‘Laugh? I almost changed my method of contraception – Nigel Floyd’.

  After this has happened to you a few times you start to wise up, and any critic who knows the ropes (which clearly neither Trevor nor Nigel nor I did back then) learns to write in a convolutedly ‘bulletproof’ style that specifically sidesteps the use of quotable phrases. Unless, of course, a critic wants to be quoted on film posters, which many do because it serves to increase their otherwise irrelevant standing. And it seems to me that, generally speaking, the more ‘poster quotable’ a reviewer is, the less substantial or worthwhile their reviews are for the reader, viewer or listener. I refer you, for example, to the lone laudatory quote that adorned gigantic posters for the dodgy Simon Pegg comedy Run, Fatboy, Run: ‘At last, the comedy of the year! Simply perfect. Go now.’