10 Recent Movies Critics Hated (But Audiences LOVED)

Critic Score: 8%

Audience Score: 80%

Liam Neeson may not have yet gone full Bruce Willis by churning out a dozen bottom-rung action flicks per year in which he barely appears, but it's still fair to say that he's industriously committed to starring in a couple of forgettable actioners each year.

And while the majority of these films tend to receive mixed-to-negative reviews from critics, audiences still have a lot of love for Neeson and his unique brand of action-dad cinema.

Take two of his most recent efforts that have already evaporated into the cultural void, Honest Thief and The Marksman, which scored 40% and 39% from critics respectively, yet earned far more favourable audience ratings of 87% and 83%.

That's a gulf of more than 40% between critics and audiences, but that's got nothing on Neeson's recently-released new thriller Blacklight.

Rather than receive mixed-ish reviews per Neeson's usual, it landed a damning 8%, in turn becoming by far the worst-reviewed film of the actor's career.

Critics blasted Blacklight as a uniquely dull thriller from the Neeson stable, indulging in cliches with an enthusiastic efficiency as to render it almost unbearably snoozy.

And yet, 80% of audiences had a good time with it. That 72% rating difference is difficult to make sense of, though can perhaps be explained by two factors.

First, everybody's dad loves Liam Neeson and will therefore cut him a ton of slack, and secondly, generic storytelling is a lot less offensive to audiences than critics, because they haven't been as relentlessly exposed to unremarkable genre films as jaded reviewers.

It's telling that even the four and five-star audience reviews often refer to Blacklight as a decent "time killer" that delivers what it advertises on the tin, which by way of Neeson's grizzled presence is apparently enough to earn it a thumbs up.