I like disaster flicks, which rarely rate very highly with critics
2012 - I probably watch it a few times a year. (39%)
The Day After Tomorrow - maybe a bit less frequently than 2012. (44%)
Knowing - End of the World, Cool sfx, Nic Cage, baby! (33%)
I’m surprised San Andreas got 50%. It doesn’t totally suck but it’s not in the pantheon of disaster flicks either IMO
One of my daughters: “poppi you work all day and then you sit there smiling while watching movies about the end of the world”
Everyone has already mentioned the movies I like (Constantine would tops that list for me). I have no idea how any of my liked movies are rated on rotten tomatoes because the few times I’ve checked reviews there, I came away with the impression that folks have forgotten the #1 purpose of any movie (from the consumer perspective) Entertainment, and that a the folks posting reviews, negative or positive, go to movies with the intent to analyze every bit of the movie. There are very few truly bad movies.
Also ‘Bedazzled’ - Brendan Fraser was great in that. (49%)
I was going to add Amazing Spider-Man 2 to this thread (yes I legitimately like that movie. So much so it made me like the prior one more in retrospect) but to my surprise it was just barely over 50% on RT.
The 2005 aviation/action movie Stealth.
I put off watching it for a long time because I had heard so many bad things about it but…I really liked it…
Sure its a big dumb action movie but it doesn’t pretend to be anything else, its also fun, exciting, has some great sequences, likable characters, excellent special effects and a perfectly passable story. More than anything you can tell the cast and crew also had a lot of fun making it, it just comes across on screen, and that makes such a nice change from all the sour doom and gloom dark material that’s out there these days.
My only regret is that I didn’t go to the cinema to see it on the big screen, I’ll not make that mistake with Top Gun 2 no matter what the critics/word of mouth says.
Stealth
2005 ‧ Thriller/Action ‧ 2h 1m
Play trailer on YouTube
5.1/10IMDb
12%Rotten Tomatoes
35%Metacritic
I stopped listening to critics or other peoples opinions on movies some time ago and just make my own mind up on things.
Also:
Battleship
2012 ‧ Sci-fi/Thriller ‧ 2h 11m
Play trailer on YouTube
5.8/10IMDb
34%Rotten Tomatoes
41%Metacritic
Another one I enjoyed a lot more than I was expecting to, and much better and more entertaining than the more critically acclaimed Battle: Los Angeles of the same period.
It’s from 1999, but close enough - The Thirteenth Warrior, 33% on RT, starring Antonio Banderas and a bunch of large Vikings. It’s a total mess but also totally fun, even moving at parts, and IMHO better than the Michael Crichton book it’s based on.
It was also apparently one of the biggest flops of all times, which is weird since there’s no real budget of any sort evident.
How is it that low on RT? I love this movie.
I know! It deserved an Oscar for the “learning Swedish” scene alone.
I couldn’t Google for “Rotten < 50%” but one under-rated movie occurred to me.
The “noir” film Remedy (2004) (distinct from Remedy (2013)) gets only 4.2 IMDB stars and Rotten Tomatoes doesn’t rate it at all. Not a good movie, but I liked it more than, say, the “noir” Mulholland Dr. which got 7.9 IMDB stars and 83-88% Rotten Tomatoes.
(Are the “Rotten” scores a better guide than IMDB stars?)
I also thought National Treasure was fun. (Not so the sequel, which gets only 35% Tomatoes.)
I liked “To Live And Die in LA” (although when Pankow died, I cheered).
Also “The Boondock Saints”, both 1 and 2 and the First “Evil Dead 2”. Bruce Campbell breaking plates over his own head (and then giving himself the finger) is awesome!
That seems to be quite a popular positive movie opinion. Evil Dead 2: Dead by Dawn is at 98% critics, 89% audience.
My wife and I thought Dark Phoenix, the latest X-men movie, was excellent.
Not the best of the bunch, but I would rank the X-men movies like this:
X-men: Days of Future Past
Logan
X-men 2
X-men First Class
Dark Phoenix
X-Men 1
X-men Apocalypse
X-men 3
The Wolverine
X-men Origins: Wolverine
The Objective has a 32% audience score and a 33% critics score (though technically not enough critics have reviewed it to reach a consensus) but I enjoyed it. A special forces team sent to look for an influential cleric in Afghanistan run into into some supernatural shenanigans. It’s got a bit of a slow buildup but those of you who are fans of Lovecraftian horror might enjoy this one.
I saw EuroTrip for the first time on cable a few months ago, and was surprised how much I liked it. It’s got 47% on Rotten Tomatoes but I thought it was pretty good.
Big budget movies, debatably. But there is a vast ocean of truly awful independent movies made each year.
I’m very surprised. They never run it on cable… and at the time although I liked it, everyone who went to see it told me they hated it.
Q: Is there a way to sort the RT database to see which movies drop below the threshold?
Jennifer’s Body. I just got around to watching it last night. I have a list of recommended/controversial movies that I pull from when I don’t have anything specific I’m looking for, on the increasingly few occasions I go to a rental place.
I have no idea why it’s rated as low as it is. While it wasn’t exactly perfect, it’s way better than many films of its kind. It was surprisingly smart and subversive, and both Megan Fox and Amanda Seyfried play their characters with far more depth than I expected. You’d look at the cover and think of both of them as “eye candy with a gore topping” but you get actual bloody acting. They actually do better than actors in many higher-rated movies I’ve seen. Most movies like this I would never even think of re-watching because there’s no depth to them, but I honestly think I’d get more out of it a second time.
Shitty marketing? A production team that had no idea what kind of movie they were making or how they were supposed to promote it? Too much comedy peanut-butter in the horror chocolate for some people’s taste? Anti-feminist backlash? ¯_(ツ)_/¯
It’s actually a decent movie.
It was partly a (completely unwarranted) Megan Fox backlash, I think.
Also, reviews like Ebert’s "Twilight for boys” show that (mostly male) reviewers just didn’t get it. I think a lot of people were expecting some sort of sexploitation horror flick, so yeah, anti-feminist backlash is probably a good part of it too. Or “How dare you kill my boner with your Lady Stories!”
That’s odd to me; I see it on cable all the time. For example, it’s on Showtime 2 tomorrow afternoon. It’s possible it’s only ever on Showtime channels on cable, though, and if you don’t get Showtime it would seem like it’s never on cable.
I didn’t have Showtime for the longest time and things like the Saw franchise were just never on my cable system. Once I finally got Showtime, it had aged out of whatever exclusive deal they had and now they’re on Starz and IFC all the time.