Movies where Rotten Tomatoes got the rating completely wrong

Boondocks saints hasn't aged well, for multiple reasons. There are no significant female or minority characters, it's a movie about white male vigilantes solving the world's problems with guns, and I'm pretty sure they murder two men for 'going to a sex show'.


And yet it's undeniably unique, is filmed well, has a dark comedic edge, and the juxtaposition of the brother's great chemistry and Willem Dafoe's eccentric detective investigating them really works.


It's a beautiful disaster.

If a film needs significant female or minority characters to be good, Sleuth is a terrible film.

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[quote=I_Wear_Pants;2509568]...I found one! Kenneth Branagh's Frankenstein has a 42% and I think it deserves way higher than that. Seriously I don't do it on purpose but a lot of my favorite films are heavily lauded. It's not a conscious effort to agree with critics. It just happens.

And my own favorite Valley of the Dolls, seems the audience likes it more than the critics.

[gets on soapbox]

Friendly reminder that the RT score is not a measure of "quality", as in 100% = "perfect movie", but rather an aggregate of a selection of critics. If a film has a 100%, it means that every critic had a favorable reaction to it, but that favorable reaction can range from "IT'S AMAZING!!!!1" to "it was good *shrug*". By the same measure, a film that gets 50% doesn't mean it's mediocre or average, but that the overall critics reaction was divided, with 50% thinking it was good (with all the spectrum of possibilities that "good" might entail, see above) and 50% thinking it was "not good" (with all the spectrum of possibilities that that might entail as well).

[gets off soapbox]

Sorry, but the mis-representation of what the RT score means is a bit of a pet peeve of mine. Carry on.

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I think there's lots where I, personally, would disagree. If you look at their top list and ask yourself whether you've seen any or all of these, you have to wonder. I've seen some of them, would agree that they're good, but it all looks like a list curated by a college professor who teaches a very pretentious "Film History" course.

Is the 1920 Golem movie really the greatest or has it just been sitting there for a long time with a few glowing reviews by some professorial film historians? Did it just not not hit the minimum for dropping off the list and become sanctified? How many top ratings does a movie need? Is 1000 9.6's worse than a movie with 30 10's? A lot of this looks like statistical errors to me. I DID see Golem in an academic setting, and, aside from historical interest and cinematic literacy, I thought it was a waste of time. I'd give a bunch of the others a similar comment.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_o...otten_Tomatoes

" rather an aggregate of a selection of critics. "

This is exactly my problem. Who are the critics, do they know more than I do? If my example of Golem continues, I would ask about both recency error (the tendency to rate something new high) vs movies that have become academic war horses and are untouchable. I might make an argument that, compared to something like Golem, the technical proficiency and purely mechanical improvements in movies (lighting, cameras, bigger sets, color, digital scenery, etc) make a historical comparison into nonsense.

When I was a kid, I recall hearing older adults say that Gone With the Wind was the greatest movie ever, but changing social values and time have eroded that. It looks cheesy and cringeworthy now. I won't even get started on Birth of a Nation.

The question would be "more about what?". About film? Probably yes, solely on the strength that it's part of their job to be educated in film history, techniques, and whatnot. That's not to say that there can't be "regular people" that know more about those things than critics. Of course, there are, but historic importance, influence, and filming techniques are not all the things that resonate with audiences when watching a film.

A more important question would be "why do you read film reviews from critics?". Do you read it expecting the critic to tell you what to like or what not? what's good or what's bad? Personally, I try to extract what was the overall experience from the critic and gauge if that's an experience I'd like to have. It can be technical skills from the filmmaker, special effects, effective jumpscares, a good laugh, whatever. Those can come in films that have an 100% RT score, as well as 75%, 40%, and 10%.

If you're gonna use Rotten Tomatoes to decide what to watch, don't just look at the score. Read the reviews; a Fresh one, a Rotten one... or two, and then decide if that's an experience you'd want to embark on, cause at the end of the day no critic knows more about you than you do.

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There are important differences. Sleuth is a two man show. Boondock Saints has a ton of characters, both named and in the background, but I only remember one person of color, who is shot immediately, and the female characters are there to either be sex objects or exist so men can yell at them and humiliate them. It's not a great look.

Movies don't need equal representation to be good, but this takes place in a major metropolitan city, with 50+ on screen characters/extras, and is almost exclusively inhabited by white men. Even a movie from the 30's and 40's would have a few female characters here and there. And people of color would exist in some capacity.

I was being facetious. I get what you meant. It sounds like Boondock Saints, which I've honestly not seen, just because I haven't, is misogynistic and white-washed. I get it; films need representation. It depends on the context of the film. Sleuth gets away with it because it's supposed to only be two stuffy white guys. Boondock Saints doesn't get away with it because it is set in a metropolis.

I'm not sure the purpose of these pictures. Are we comparing the critics and the public? I never expect my tastes to coincide with anyone else's. That's folly of large proportion. The guy who started the thread never said who had to agree with us. We just had to disagree with the RT critics.

Your Golem example goes to what I posted earlier about a general misunderstanding of how the Rotten Tomatoes score works. The fact that the film has a 100% doesn't mean it's "the greatest" or that it's any better than any other film with a 90%, 70%, or even 50% score. It just means that the 32 Top Critics that reviewed it had a favorable reaction to it. But that information is more or less worthless unless you look at the reviews that are linked below. If you read the reviews and decide this is a journey you'd be down for, you might end up with a favorable reaction as well.

Bottom line is that we need to look past the RT score and even the individual ratings, and read what a critic has to say about a film. That's what we can use to decide whether the film is "for us". Scores and ratings are just numbers, useful to quantify and rank and compare, but not much more.

It should be self evident, it's nothing about nothing. Not every post has a deep meaning, mine don't. I thought it would be fun to see what the RT scores were for some movies that people had mentioned, so I looked them up. Instead of copy paste I just did screenshots as that was faster. My post with the screenshots offers no conclusions, no commentary, just a bit of fun.

You could get lost in the weeds with this subject, but for me, I was just having fun with the topic without overthinking it. But I'll overthink now.

There are several you just know -in general- aren't really going to be the critics' choice, like Resident Evil and all its sequels.

And yes, I know they're not high art, but as escapist popcorn movies, I thought they were a lot of fun. And when they started showing them in 3D, yup, there I was, opening week, center seat at the IMAX with my glasses on, and feeling like a kid at Christmas, watching Milla kick ass and looking cool doing it.

To be fair, if you do look at the RT reviews, there are a few positive ones, they aren't all stuffed shirts - and a lot of regular folks at Letterboxd grade them low too. As for myself, I grade on a genre curve, and Resident Evil received a 4 based on the happiness scale.

So, I'd throw in those movies into the mix, knowing full well they were never going earn a passing grade from the aggregate in the first place.

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That works. I try hard not to assume things that I don't feel are clearly defined. Yeah it was interesting to see what the scores were. It's interesting to see how different my critiques are from the general populace as well as the critics.

The audience score is honestly a better rating to go by than the critics. Not that it's perfect either, but I find the audience score is a good way to judge if the movie is enjoyable in the way you would assume, based on the trailers.

The audience is typically the target demographic and/or fanbase. Critics are paid to be there. Casuals would go to a movie as a public audience member too. Yeah my younger brother took a journalism class in high school and he had to go see movies he wouldn't have otherwise for the school paper. He didn't want to see them, and see them he did. I do not know if he liked them or not.

Yeah, this is another layer where people find themselves usually at odds. How to compare, say, Resident Evil with Citizen Kane, for example. As far as I'm concerned, the former doesn't even have to be dismissed as an "escapist popcorn movie". It just has different goals than, for example Citizen Kane. And I think that's how we need to view and critique films; based on what you perceive are the goals of the filmmaker.

I mean, I'm sure that Paul W.S. Anderson didn't set out to win Oscars or the Palme d'Or when he made Resident Evil. He just wanted to make a cool, kick-ass video game adaptation and, as far as a lot of people are concerned, he succeeded and his film should be critiqued accordingly, instead of criticizing it against the goals of The Pianist or Kung-Pow (all released in the same year).

When I assign a rating, I tend to factor in those goals, but also how entertained/engaged/thrilled I was, and although I'm not a huge fan of it, I think Resident Evil does a pretty solid job at what it set out to do.

That makes sense to me. I hardly every look up movies on Rotten Tomatoes, I use IMDB and Wiki for that...but if I did look at RT it would be the audience score that would interest me the most.

That's how I rate films too. A low budget Roger Corman film that delivers what it was trying to do and does so with flair can win more review points than a so called important film that doesn't fully deliver what it was aiming for....In my book an escapist popcorn movie could be a 4/5 maybe even higher if I really loved it.

Escapist popcorn movie isn't a dismissive, not how I use it, only an acknowledgement of what it's shooting for. And grades - yeah, the 5-stars I gave to Enter the Dragon, isn't saying the same thing as the 5-Stars I gave Sansho the Bailiff, only that they both succeed at doing what they wanted to do.

And I do think most critics get that too, you review movies within context, as Roger Ebert said to Gene in that famous Benji vs Kubrick debate of 1987 - (I remember it well)

They're clearly biased towards stoner comedies:



Half Baked: 28% tomatometer, 81% audience


Grandma's Boy: 15% tomatometer, 85% audience


How High: 25% tomatometer, 79% audience

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