13 Critically Acclaimed Recent Movies That Actually Sucked
Nobody wants to admit it.
The last decade has seen the film industry shift in many significant ways, one being that the Tomatometer score of a movie is tending to have an increasing level of influence on whether audiences catch a film in the cinema, wait for Netflix, or maybe don't even bother at all.
Many movie studios are attempting to combat this, of course, by holding press screenings as last-minute as possible, yet with this huge circus surrounding the site's status as a tastemaker, does that really make it "infallible?"
Absolutely not. Aside from the obvious assertion that critical opinion is just opinion like any other, often a movie will be received with a broad level of positivity from the press, while fans and "real people" will wonder what the Hell they actually saw in it at all.
Taking the single aggregate percentage score to be an "objective" barometer of a film's quality without any exterior consideration is always going to be a foolish move, because you like what you like at the end of the day, but even so, it's staggering that these 13 disappointments were essentially given a free pass by most of the press...
13. Kong: Skull Island
Rotten Tomatoes Score: 76% (6.5/10 average score)
What The Critics Said: The press largely praised the new Kong movie for being a "fun" blockbuster romp. That is to say, it didn't require much thought, it didn't outstay its welcome by clocking in under two hours, and featured an insanely talented cast.
Why It Actually Sucked: John C. Reilly's character is actually the only interesting one in the entire movie, with everyone else pretty much adhering to well-worn archetypes in a deathly dull monster movie that also suffers from Jordan Vogt-Roberts' mediocre direction and an abundance of blurry CGI.
The rollicking dad rock soundtrack and occasional monster brawl shenanigans prevent it from being an abject disaster, but this was nevertheless an incredibly low-effort blockbuster for the most part, an apparently necessary evil before Kong squares off against Godzilla in 2020.