Reviewing movies is inherently a subjective enterprise, a fact that’s always worth keeping in mind whenever a snobby critic bashes a movie you were looking forward to — or turns up their nose at a film you thought was a super-fun experience. From time to time, though, there’s no getting around it: The critics have just flat-out gotten things wrong, perhaps as a result of groupthink or because watching too many movies has made them jaded a-holes and less able to appreciate individual titles on their merits.
Whatever the reason, critics will not infrequently miss the mark on all sorts of movies. And in this post, I’m going to showcase a list of films from the recent past as well as the not-so-recent past that I think critics by and large got wrong — leading up to the movie that, in my opinion, is among the most wronged of all time by the professional reviewer class.
The Super Mario Bros. Movie (2023)
Let’s start with an easy one.
Look, I’m not even a serious gamer, I didn’t own a Nintendo system for most of my life, and I feel like I’m the last person who ought to be saying this: But watching The Super Mario Bros. Movie on the big screen was so much fun. With one exception that I’ll come to, none of the movies I’m going to highlight in this post aim for some kind of artistic “greatness,” whatever that is; regardless, they can still achieve a specific kind of entertainment — making people feel good, without resorting to lowest-common-denominator tactics. That’s what the Mario movie absolutely did.
The Super Mario Bros. Movie was clearly written and made by people who have an affection for the iconic video game franchise. It’s vibrant, colorful, and features a great cast (props to whoever cast Jack Black as the super-villain Bowser). All in all, the movie captured the essence of the games pretty well, so shame on the critics for this one — that score above should definitely be higher.
Hook (1991)
If you force me to, I can sort of grudgingly accept some of the critical response to this next movie — even though it still belongs in the same bucket as the Mario movie.
Seriously: A 29% critics’ score for this childhood classic? “Bad form,” in the words of Dustin Hoffman’s Captain Hook, “bad form.”
Hook was a favorite of mine as a kid (as I’m sure it was for many of you, too), and it couldn’t have had finer actors than Hoffman and Robin Williams portraying Captain Hook and Peter Pan, respectively. The whimsy and nostalgia here are off the charts, and while I understand director Steven Spielberg has a complicated relationship with the movie — later expressing regret about certain choices — it’s important to remember this movie wasn’t made for critics.
It was made for kids who still believed in magic and the whimsy of stories like Peter Pan’s. And on that score, it was an unqualified success.
Tommy Boy (1995)
Next up, another comedy classic that was unfairly shellacked by reviewers.
I mean, seriously, they weren’t trying to make a Citizen Kane sequel here. Nevertheless, out came the knives. From Variety: “Stupid is apparently in.” Likewise, the UK’s Observer: “Peter Segal’s dismal Tommy Boy is the latest addition to Hollywood’s cult of moron.” The disparity in the ratings above, though, make it clear who belongs to the real cult of moron, though.
A quarter of a million viewers pushed this one into 90% territory for good reason. Mostly, I’d wager, because of the humor and heart — and the comedy gold pairing of Chris Farley and David Spade.
The Last Jedi (2017)
For my next-to-last movie that I feel the critics got embarrassingly wrong, I must ask you to venture with me into the heart of darkness — aka the Star Wars fan community.
I kid, because I’m actually one of them. It seems to me that Disney lets creators of Star Wars-themed movies and TV shows run wildly amok and make all kinds of stupid creative choices in the name of … I don’t know, being bold or something. Which causes the fans of this beloved franchise that’s been around for about 90+ years to foam at the mouth in justifiable anger, which then causes Disney or whoever to tut-tut, “Ugh, you guys are so emotional.” And on and on they battle, feeding off each other, in the beautiful circle of life.
No, but seriously: The Last Jedi sucked.
The movie, among other things, turned Luke into a grumpy oldster, had Leia floating through outer space, and had characters make one mind-bogglingly stupid choice after another — while the whole thing doesn’t so much continue the Star Wars story, it just tries to see how much of it can be subverted. Just … because.
It’s bad. Not Acolyte-bad. But still.
The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (2013)
Finally, I alluded to an exception above — and this is the one. The Secret Life of Walter Mitty is a movie that really did aim for beauty and meaning, that wanted to make you feel something profound.
Maybe I’m biased because I work in journalism (Ben Stiller’s version of Walter Mitty has him employed in the photography department at Life magazine, handling and archiving photo negatives). Nevertheless, I cannot say enough good things about this movie, which depicted Stiller’s Mitty as an idealistic dreamer who then goes off on a grand adventure around the world in an attempt to break himself out of his comfort zone and fall in love with being a human on this remarkable planet. It’s an uplifting story, with beautiful cinematography and a stirring score (and a sublime cover of Space Oddity by Kristen Wiig).
To those of us who loved the movie, the motto of Life magazine — which gets essentially raided by a corporate cost-cutter, the same sad story so many of us have lived through — is a rallying cry about finding your purpose and living a life less ordinary:
“To see the world, things dangerous to come to, to see behind walls, to draw closer, to find each other and to feel. That is the purpose of life.”
