Critics » Mike Russell » Rotten
Mike Russell

Mike Russell

Agrees with the Tomatometer 73% of the time.

Publications:
Oregonian
Total Reviews:
189

Worst Reviewed Films

Showing 1 - 50 of 187
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Rating T-Meter Title | Year Add Date
F+ 43% American Reunion (2012) " Scenes will wander from gross-out gag to sentimental schmaltz to pervy leer to cheap nostalgia within a 30-second span, utterly free of clear directorial guidance. Even worse, very little of it is remotely funny." — Oregonian
Posted Apr 5, 2012
F- 5% Old Dogs (2009) " Really, what it affirms is that studio executives are already making movies for the future-audience from Idiocracy." — Oregonian
Posted Nov 29, 2009
F+ 14% I Love You Beth Cooper (2009) " I was stunned to learn that Beth Cooper was created by actual filmmaking veterans." — Oregonian
Posted Jul 10, 2009
F+ 35% Southland Tales (2007) " The actors barely comprehend their lines. The pop-culture references are lame. Nearly every moment falls flat. And it's boring." — Oregonian
Posted Nov 16, 2007
D- 27% Splinterheads (2009) " The leads have no chemistry; the supporting cast of carnies and eccentrics is bland; the staging is dull; not a single gag lands; and Justin and Galaxy's one get-to-know-you conversation is never heard because it's buried in a road trip music montage." — Oregonian
Posted Nov 12, 2009
D- 14% The Spirit (2008) " The Spirit is a loony, embarrassing mess that takes the late Will Eisner's classic comics creation and beats it senseless with a giant toilet bowl (literally, at one point)." — Oregonian
Posted Dec 29, 2008
D 58% She's Out of My League (2010) " Its gormless, assertion-free protagonist offends as a role model for idiot youths, and, even worse, offends as drama." — Oregonian
Posted Mar 12, 2010
D 13% The Informers (2009) " A grim, open-ended study in smooth surfaces, skin and 25-year-old pop-culture references." — Oregonian
Posted Apr 24, 2009
D 42% He's Just Not That Into You (2009) " Scratch the surface, and the movie's underpinnings are an insult to women everywhere -- the film is slick stupid propaganda for the myth of The One True Love that wastes the talents of fine actresses." — Oregonian
Posted Feb 6, 2009
D 54% Mamma Mia! (2008) " I can see how Mamma Mia! might be a fun stage musical. As a movie musical, it's a train wreck." — Oregonian
Posted Jul 18, 2008
D 64% Dan in Real Life (2007) " Imagine what it would take to make an audience prefer Dane Cook over Steve Carell, then double it." — Oregonian
Posted Oct 26, 2007
D 26% Hoot (2006) " The errant subplots go nowhere. The movie has an episodic TV quality so pronounced, I kept expecting commercial breaks." — Oregonian
Posted May 5, 2006
35% Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time (2010) " It finally just grinds you down with its sheer dull busy-ness." — Oregonian
Posted May 27, 2010
58% Edge of Darkness (2010) " Edge of Darkness fails as a comeback vehicle, as a remake and, to a lesser degree, as a popcorn thriller." — Oregonian
Posted Jan 28, 2010
25% John Tucker Must Die (2006) " This comedy about four high-school girls getting revenge on a triple-timing jock strikes the poses of a teen sex comedy, but it contains no sex and hardly any comedy." — Oregonian
Posted Jul 28, 2006
26% The Omen (2006) " Transplanting so much of the original story to a 21st-century setting only amplifies how badly the story has aged." — Oregonian
Posted Jun 6, 2006
D+ 36% Battleship (2012) " There's almost nothing to "Battleship" beyond its grindingly dull, digitally rendered naval warfare; the flick could easily be retitled "Flying Ordinance and Forgettable Stars: The Motion Picture."" — Oregonian
Posted May 17, 2012
D+ 13% The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor (2008) " Every vestige of the first Mummy movie's wit and charm is buried in an avalanche of noise and motion. It's exhausting." — Oregonian
Posted Aug 1, 2008
C- 25% Law Abiding Citizen (2009) " The movie starts out as a potboiler with a troubling character arc; unfortunately, it ends up becoming a goofy, story-overwhelming Rube Goldberg contraption that would make the producers of the Saw series blush." — Oregonian
Posted Oct 15, 2009
C- 43% The Proposal (2009) " The movie's lazy, formulaic story quickly becomes an excruciating waste of talent." — Oregonian
Posted Jun 19, 2009
C- 34% Alien Trespass (2009) " One gets the sinking feeling as Alien Trespass drags on that [director] Goodwin thought he could build a whole movie out of a few formal gags about bad editing." — Oregonian
Posted Apr 3, 2009
C- 35% Pride and Glory (2008) " Like We Own the Night before it, Pride and Glory is the most depressing sort of not-that-great movie because it really wants to be an epic drama and a serious actor showcase, but it just can't close the deal." — Oregonian
Posted Oct 24, 2008
C- 46% Lakeview Terrace (2008) " Lakeview Terrace grabs a fistful of hot-button story elements -- race, sex, politics -- and promptly mixes them into the thriller equivalent of tapioca." — Oregonian
Posted Sep 19, 2008
C- 19% Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008) " Getting worked up over this is like getting worked up over a Saturday-morning cartoon. Unlike its predecessors, this one doesn't even try to aspire to myth. It aspires only to merchandising." — Oregonian
Posted Aug 15, 2008
C- 27% What Happens in Vegas (2008) " You know how some movies feel like they were made by a committee? What Happens in Vegas feels like it was made by checklist." — Oregonian
Posted May 9, 2008
C- 13% Mr. Woodcock (2007) " It looks like Billy Bob Thornton has gotten to this lucrative W.C. Fields place in his career where he fills his coffers by playing endless variations on the same character." — Oregonian
Posted Sep 14, 2007
C- 20% Death Sentence (2007) " An ugly, stupid and meaningless thriller." — Oregonian
Posted Aug 31, 2007
C- 27% Evening (2007) " The uneven filmmaking renders Minot's ideas impossibly trite. ...Ugh." — Oregonian
Posted Jun 29, 2007
C- 60% Al Franken: God Spoke (2006) " I haven't seen this much smug, awkward laughter and bathos since, well, Man of the Year." — Oregonian
Posted Nov 10, 2006
C- 48% Driving Lessons (2006) " A soft-edged little movie. It also wants to be more idiosyncratic than it is. Which would be fine if the movie were moderately charming, funny or clever. It really isn't." — Oregonian
Posted Nov 3, 2006
C- 60% The Boynton Beach Club (2006) " Good intentions and strong thespians aside, Seidelman's writing and filmmaking are bland, obvious and uninvolving." — Oregonian
Posted Oct 6, 2006
C- 28% Trust the Man (2006) " Trust the Man has some good laughs courtesy of its cast -- but they're basically papering over a script that's masquerading as urbane and trenchant, when it's really self-involved and didactic and more than a little foolish." — Oregonian
Posted Sep 1, 2006
C- 7% Basic Instinct 2 (2006) " Other than its deliriously trashy intro and a loopy twist ending that questions reality itself, Basic Instinct 2 is way too restrained in every sense." — Oregonian
Posted Mar 31, 2006
C 20% The Lucky One (2012) " When the film tries to inject anything resembling high drama, it gets dumb in a hurry." — Oregonian
Posted Apr 19, 2012
C 65% The Woman in Black (2012) " To my thinking, this splendid low-key bummer of a ghost story was eventually undermined by the film's increasing reliance on shock-scares, in which something suddenly and noisily jumps into the frame, over and over and over." — Oregonian
Posted Feb 2, 2012
C 67% We Bought a Zoo (2011) " "Zoo" leaves you wondering whether Crowe was spooked by the mixed reaction to "Vanilla Sky" and "Elizabethtown" and chose to play it safe, remixing echoes of his usual screenwriting devices, in pursuit of a surefire hit." — Oregonian
Posted Dec 22, 2011
C 60% Real Steel (2011) " Mostly it's dopey. The movie just begs too many logical questions for its own good." — Oregonian
Posted Oct 6, 2011
C 83% Dolphin Tale (2011) " It's a mild shame that "Dolphin Tale" director Charles Martin Smith and his screenwriters have chosen to lard the true-life saga up with a bunch of easily digested imaginary detail straight out of the bland Hollywood feel-good recipe mix." — Oregonian
Posted Sep 22, 2011
C 34% Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides (2011) " I wouldn't call "On Stranger Tides" a disaster, but it does take everything that was charming about the first film and remixes it far less carefully and at a slower pitch, rendering it mildly diverting and shockingly sludgy." — Oregonian
Posted May 19, 2011
C 26% Arthur (2011) " A tired story full of pratfalls, barn-broad gags, cartoonish stuffed shirts, and the exact same story beats you've seen in a million rom-coms, right down to the wedding-aisle confrontation." — Oregonian
Posted Apr 7, 2011
C 71% I Love You Phillip Morris (2010) " Carrey fearlessly gives it his best shot, but this fundamental schizophrenia strong-armed me out of the film, and left me feeling like McGregor's more grounded performance existed in another movie entirely." — Oregonian
Posted Dec 16, 2010
C 37% Burlesque (2010) " A clichéd drag that wastes talented actors." — Oregonian
Posted Nov 23, 2010
C 39% Due Date (2010) " This feels like minor Phillips to me -- something in the neighborhood of 2006's "School for Scoundrels," quality-wise, though with a much grimmer heart." — Oregonian
Posted Nov 4, 2010
C 70% Ramona and Beezus (2010) " King is good enough that you can't help but root for her. But frankly, I can't imagine paying full ticket price plus concessions for that privilege." — Oregonian
Posted Jul 22, 2010
C 49% The Twilight Saga: Eclipse (2010) " It's stagnant to the degree that screenwriter Melissa Rosenberg pads out the narrative with no fewer than three narrated costume-drama flashbacks." — Oregonian
Posted Jun 29, 2010
C 42% Brooklyn's Finest (2010) " I was emotionally involved in the film's final showdowns. It's a shame this involvement is largely earned by Gere, Snipes and Fuqua in spite of some false moments on the page that hold the film back from the greatness it craves." — Oregonian
Posted Mar 4, 2010
C 24% Serious Moonlight (2009) " I appreciate that talented people wanted to honor Shelly by making this film. They likely would have better honored her by mounting her script as a play." — Oregonian
Posted Dec 11, 2009
C 18% The Fourth Kind (2009) " The movie's carnival-barker hard sell is that it's after The Truth. It's really after an opening-weekend gross, of course. It's sporadically clever and chilling, but I'll be shocked if it endures as a Blair Witch-style horror vérité phenomenon." — Oregonian
Posted Nov 5, 2009
C 38% Cirque du Freak: The Vampire's Assistant (2009) " The film is competent without being spectacular or thrilling." — Oregonian
Posted Oct 23, 2009
C 56% Orphan (2009) " It takes too long to get started, it pulls some key punches, its dialogue is deeply uninteresting, it relies way too heavily on endless jump-scares and its finale is pure slasher-flick formula." — Oregonian
Posted Jul 24, 2009
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