Dear film critics: When it comes to genre films, you’re irrelevant
Pity the poor film critics. While The Expendables gave them a good chance to flex their sarcasm muscles, the audience kicked sand in their faces on the way to the theatres, proving them to be taste-making weaklings.
If you don’t know, the film is a Sylvester Stallone vehicle, and features some of the great names in action moviedom from the past 30 to 35 years (even a cameo by Ahhnohld!)
Its Tomatometer rating was a poor 39 per cent, meaning the critics largely dissed the flick.
However, that didn’t stop it from topping the box office on its opening weekend. It held on to first place this weekend, in spite of (or because of) five new wide releases.
Here were some of the barbs directed at the film as collected at Rotten Tomatoes:
- If you like watching men with no necks thumping each other, this could be your Citizen Kane (David Edwards, Time Out)
- Not since Rocky worked out in a meat locker has Sylvester Stallone surrounded himself with so much aging beef (John Beifus, Commercial Appeal, Memphis, TN)
- The brain-dead male equivalent of Sex and the City 2 (Lou Lemenick, New York Post)
But then there was this glimmer of insight:
- The Expendables is like dating a jock – no sparkling conversation or subtlety but great to have around when you need to blow sh-t up or kick some ass (Beth Accomando, KSPS.org)
Generally, I like how Globe and Mail film review contributor Stephen Cole tried to bridge the divide between critiquing The Expendables as a film and as an action entertainment product (although there are factual errors in his plot summary):
Say what you want about Sly’s latest. Yes, it’s violent – brutishly so. There’s so much slugging and shooting, so much loose testosterone, male viewers might sprout another testicle. And it’s sometimes galling watching all these old warhorses camp it up, decorating every line with a wink to show they’ve what … matured? Grown as actors?
Still, what makes Sly’s new film fascinating is that, 35 years after he created and starred in the ultimate little-boy fantasy, Rocky, Stallone remains such a guileless, big-dreaming innocent. If you want to add dope, go ahead. But you’d be missing out on a career’s worth of preposterous, low-grade entertainment.
Cole gave the film two out of four stars. That’s probably fair when rating it as a conventional film.
Unfortunately, it isn’t a conventional film. It’s an action movie. And as an action movie, it’s in solid three-star territory.
Generally speaking, action movies should have:
- cool, tough-guy stars
- hot women
- wisecracks
- well-thought-out, well-choreographed bang-bang
All this should combine to provide fast-paced, visceral excitement. For the most part, The Expendables does that. My main complaint is that Stallone, wearing his director’s hat, runs out of mayhem ideas towards the end. Many of his one-on-one combat sequences became repetitive, and that made the film drag just enough to diminish the fun.
On balance, however, I thought the reviewers collectively undersold the film as a piece of action entertainment. So far, it would seem the audience agrees.
If I were an entertainment editor, I’d offer two different ratings for films such as The Expendables and other genre offerings: Rating it as an overall movie, and rating it in accordance with the expectations of its target audience.
I don’t really care if a Stallone film developed its characters very well or had a brilliantly-constructed plot. I expect that it will not.
What I do care about is whether it blew shit up real good and provides the entertainment value I expect from such a meathead movie.
To that end, maybe film review jobs should be treated differently by publications. Maybe rather than one or two staff reviewers, you need more freelance voices who specialize in particular types of films.
General film reviewer X, who doesn’t like action movies to begin with, isn’t going to be much help for me in deciding whether to make a choice about whether it’s worth $12.75 to see The Expendables.
A niche reviewer who can say how it rates on the Blow-Shit-Up-O-Meter? That’s useful to me as a consumer.
As a film theory grad, I have to disagree with you, Bill. Film criticism should not pander to the films they are reviewing. All film is, for better or worse, looked at as art. Otherwise, what is the point of putting it on film.
Of course, The Expendables bombed critically. And I’m not really surprised it’s stayed on top of the box office its first two weeks.
However, by suggesting that film reviewers don’t get genre films, you’re painting a pretty wide brush with that statement. There are genre films that rise above the rest in their genre and get critically praised (for action, one could argue Gladiator was critically praised and did well at the box office, romantic-comedy wise, look at Love Actually or 500 Days of Summer).
You can say that film reviewers are out of tune with the movie going public, but film reviewers have always been out of tune with the movie going public (Roger Ebert destroyed Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, something he has since said he regrets doing).
When you paint genre films as just being genre films, you not only diminish film critics’ roles, you also diminish the genre films they are reviewing (by classifying them as not art from the get-go).
Hi Sarah:
Hate to be crass, but one of the reasons to put something on film is to make money.
An old friend of mine works in the movie biz. He once joked that when you’re working on “The Amityville Horror, Part 4,” you get disabused very quickly of any notion you’re in the art business.
But just because something is commercial doesn’t mean it can’t have its artistic moments. I do think that critics are often looking in the wrong places for said moments.
Jet Li’s “Kiss of the Dragon” is a terrible movie in many ways, but it has some spectacular action sequences. Towards the end, Li fights with then-emerging French action star Cyril Raffaelli.
When Li dispatched Raffaelli’s character in a particularly creative way, a guy in the seat behind me jumped up, pointed his finger at the screen and bellowed: “Man, that is fucking ART!!” :)
I value the work of good professional film critics, particularly when they help me understand why a film is good and to put it into broader context.
But to simply sneer at something such as “The Expendables” while overlooking its entertainment value as an action film isn’t useful to me, because I’m primarily seeing it to be entertained.
I see your point, but one could further the argument by saying Hollywood is in the film business to make money. Which it is. Doesn’t mean they can’t aspire to more (as many other world cinemas do). I know critics don’t always get it right, but I feel it’s just as close-minded to say they’re overlooking all this great stuff because of the surface of a film. A critic’s job, when done right, is to look at all that stuff and rate the overall film.
But “The Secret In Their Eyes”, as one example, is a completely different film than “The Expendables.”
More importantly, the audiences for the two films are completely different (except for me! :))
To treat them the same in the review process is pointless. I’m restricting my criticism to that narrow point for now — except for this: Critics sometimes do their audiences a disservice by plumbing for depth where none exists.
OTOH, maybe a G&M reviewer is playing to the prejudices of his publication’s readership by tut-tutting about the immaturity of the main characters in “The Expendables.”
I dunno. If I’d listened to the critics, I would have never seen the movie. But I did, and I saw a solidly entertaining if imperfect action flick.
So how did the critics help me?
Most people think film critics are irrelevant anyway, so they ignore them. And for the most part they are. I’m willing to wager none of them went to school for film criticism, but just fell into the job as beat reporters so often do, and stick with it because it’s “easy.” That’s infuriating to someone like me, that has the education and skill (and practice) to professionally review films, but here I am arguing why film criticism is needed on your blog (sigh).
I see your points, I do, I just disagree. Thanks for the debate, Bill. ;-)