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Rottentomatoes.com is a marvelous website, but I recently found out that it may be lying to all of us. If you don’t know what this website does, I’ll give you a brief overview: It reports on movies that are currently playing in theatres around the U.S. by providing links to pictures, videos and plot summaries.
It also collects hundreds of reviews written in newspapers, magazines and on the internet and gives the movie a rating based on the number of positive reviews divided by the total (for those non-math majors, this is called a percentage). Any movie with a rating higher than 60 percent is said to be fresh and is probably worth seeing, anything under 60 percent is rotten.
I’ve been using the site for years and it’s never steered me wrong before. In fact, I’ve watched a bunch of movies I never would have considered without RT.com because their rating was good. I don’t read specific reviewers, I only check with the all-knowing tomato before I see a flick.
I recently saw Hellboy II: The Golden Army, and I was honestly shocked when I didn’t like it. Believe it or not, but that last sentence wasn’t sarcastic. I wanted to see Hellboy II and I expected it to be good.
I had three real reasons for seeing it. To begin with, I liked the first movie. In my defense…well I don’t really have anything to say here. I thought the first one was pretty funny and it was fun to watch. It was one of those movies that got played on cable all the time after it was released on video, and I always stopped to watch it. Why not go see the second?
As anyone who saw the previews knows, the sequel was directed by Guillermo Del Toro; a genius in my opinion; who directed Pan’s Labyrinth in 2006. I’m not really sure what attracted him to a project like HBII, but he was the second reason to see this movie for me. The third was its rating of 88 percent on rottentomatoes.com. Out of 154 reviews, 135 were positive. Now that sounds like a good movie. But as I said, it was just OK.
Why did RT.com lie to me? Was it a typo somewhere? I went back to the site and actually read some of the reviews to see if I had missed something. Now, usually when a movie has a rating less than 80 I’ll read some of the reviews to see what the problems with the movie are; if it seems like I can get over the bad parts I’ll go see it anyway. But movies with an 88 percent are supposed to be all-around good movies. Turns out my assumption was wrong.
Most of the positive reviews talked about how great the movie was visually—fantastic creatures, well choreographed fight sequences, and beautiful locations—but many of them also said that the visuals were necessary to make up for a plot that was lacking in a lot of ways. So technically they were positive, but they were backhanded compliments.
The bad reviews said many of the same things as their positive counterparts, but those reviewers the visuals didn’t make up for the bad story. I fell right in line with these reviewers.
Yes, the movie does look great, the fantasy characters and creatures are pretty f**cking cool—especially the tooth fairies—and the final fight between Hellboy and the Golden Army is bada**ed, but in the middle there are some incredibly boring parts. It was an attempt at character development, but it seemed forced and I wasn’t interested at all.
I did like a good portion of the film, but I was expecting considerably more from it because of its rating. If it had scored in the low 70’s I wouldn’t have a complaint, but it scored much higher. I need to do a better job at reading between the percentages I guess, and actually checking out what reviewers have to say. Who would have seen that coming? Rottentomatoes.com is still a great website in my opinion, but it’s no longer infallible. Oh, how the mighty have fallen.
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9 Comments
So because you disagree with one subjective percentage based on hundreds of subjective reviews, Rotten Tomatoes is now lying?
It’s movie reviews, dude.
The title says kind of - We at COEDmagazine.com are actually big fans of rottentomatoes, but we stand behind Marc’s personal opinion- this is a blog and Marc’s points are valid to Marc’s personal argument.
Im gonna disagree with Matt and agree with the writer. When a movie receives consistently good ratings from critics I know that doesn’t mean I will like it with any certainty. However, I have yet to find a movie that was critically accepted and praised in which I could not understand what was being praised. I did not find anything worth praising in Hellboy 2 other than the visuals and the fighting and I have never seen another movie received so well on those merits alone before. I think the problem here is that the article writer, like most people including myself, put too much stake in a high rotten tomatoes score. I also will be wary from now on of scores on that site because of my experience with hellboy 2. Never before have I felt so deceived by critics either.
I respect what the writer wrote, but just because he thought the movie was bad doesn’t mean that RT is a lying website. It all just comes down to a matter of opinion.
Guillermo Del Toro was the director of the first Hellboy as well. It’s just that they are really selling the second one with a “look who we got to direct” spin due to the success and acclaim of Pan’s Labyrinth. And i feel that its due to this effect that somehow that essentially the same reviews can count in a different way.
Matt is exactly right. Movies are subjective. I have movies that I love that probably scored in the 30’s on Rotten Tomatoes.
You have to evaluate the movie for yourself instead of depending an an aggregator to judge what’s good and what sucks. And don’t tell me the del Toro directing made you think thiw could be good. Clearly, the visuals were great, which is what you’d expect. But sometimes all a director can do is make a stupid movie look good.
Here’s a few tips:
1. Hellboy 2 is a sequel to a crappy movie. Sequels are usually worse than the original, so it proably won’t be good.
2. They’ve promoted this movie so hard that you know the studio thinks it’s crappy.
3.It’s Hellboy, you morons. Of course it’s going to suck. I didn’t need to see a picture, a trailer or a review to know that this was going to be terrible.
Its not so much that RT is lying to you as it is reviewers.
RT bases their fresh / rotten system on a mathematical formula (as you point out) - now if a bunch of people gave it positive reviews then it is going to give you a positive score, even if its a bad movie.
ie - Indian Jones, the worst one by far, and possibly one of the worst big name movies this year so far got a 76% - why? cause critics bow down to the big duo behind it.
There are ways to cheat the system, don’t believe everything you read…
Just wanted to point out that, from what I understood from the piece, he doesn’t know that the first “Hellboy” was ALSO directed by Guillermo del Toro.
There’s a reason why I don’t go to RT.com when I’m shopping for a movie to catch at the theater, and it’s the subjective nature out of the whole thing. Perhaps it’s a matter of just sticking to one site that caters to the types of movies you might enjoy (CHUD, AICN, JoBlo, etc.) and cross your fingers. In the end it’s up to the individual to determine the quality of the movie.
I find RT to be a pretty good yardstick of movie worth. However, no reviewer, or amalgam of reviewers, is ever going to match my/your personal standards. I had the same experience with Hellboy II, “merely okay when reviews said it was great.” So what? I liked it, just not as much as somebody else said I would, so now it’s their fault? Not so much. It can go the other way, too. I enjoyed Hancock even though the reviews said it was crap. And here’s the thing: I agreed with everything the bad reviews said about Hancock, but I liked the movie anyway. You can enjoy a clunky movie even as you pick it apart inside your head.
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