This past weekend my lady and I watched a 2010 film, “The Ghost Writer,” starring a bunch of supposedly good actors. It’s about a ghostwriter, played by Ewan MacGregor, who is asked to write the biography of former British PM Pierce Brosnan, and it’s a thriller as intrigue develops. The movie was supposedly directed by Roman Polanski, who, while a rapist, has proven himself a skilled director.
The movie was atrocious. Just laughably shitty. There were no thrills. The story had any number of absurd holes and dead ends, and featured an affair with less chemistry than an antivaxxer meeting. Every shot was uninspired and flat, and some were downright amateurish; if Polanski did direct this he must have done it by text message. The purportedly chilling ending made us almost fall off the couch laughing. The movie looks cheap.
Somehow this thing has 84% on Rotten Tomatoes, and honestly I don’t get it. I have to stress that I am right; this movie sucked ass.
Rotten Tomatoes’ “fresh” ratings can be deceptive sometimes, and I think this is one such case. The “fresh” score reflects what percentage of critic reviews are “positive,” and it imposes a binary up/down rating on the film, when most critics give films a more nuanced rating (such as a number of “stars,” or a letter grade).
So, if every critic gave a film a B- or a C, or a 3-star (out of 5) review in their actual reviews, it’s likely that the vast majority of those reviews would still be classified as “positive” on Rotten Tomatoes, and could lead to a very high “Fresh” score, for a movie that reviewers actually rated as being only fair.
I read some of the detailed reviews of The Ghost Writer on the Rotten Tomatoes site, and while some reviewers who classified it as “positive” clearly loved it (and, I suspect, some of them are Polanski fans), a lot of them were giving it Bs and B-minuses, 7/10, 3.5/5, or, in one case, 58/100, all of which were still being classified as “positive.”
I enjoyed it when I saw it years ago. It rates 77 on Metacritic from 35 critic reviews and 7.4 from 244 viewer ratings. Metacritic work out their critic score by using a notional percentage derived from the individual reviews.
Well, it’s not like anyone could have realized that the woman who had a big flashing “femme fatale” sign over her head was the femme fatal. And if you find out someone is the bad guy, the smart thing to do is to tell them you know and expect them to feel guilty and contrite and not at all kill you. I really don’t understand your complaints about the movie.
…to be fair, it also had Eli Wallach in one of his last roles. It’s always nice to see him.
I forgot what movie it was but there was a movie I saw recently that was a 98% on Rotten Tomatoes but the movie wound up being overly long and very boring.
When I went to look up the specific RT reviews I realized pretty much every review gave it a 3/5 or similar mediocre score, basically all saying “Yeah it’s an interesting concept not well executed, but it’s okay”
I watched it years ago and IIRC I liked it. I had to look it up to refresh my memory on the particulars and the synopsis sure sounds convoluted. That part I do not remember.
The movie is like a film noir made by someone who’s heard about them, but never actually seen one. It’s hard to believe it was made by the same director who made Chinatown.
Now, his short story PMQ, about a British prime minister whose life completely unravels over the course of a few hours…that has the makings of a legitimately good movie. (Something like The Thick of It meets Falling Down.)
