EXCLUSIVE – Author Paul Kengor said the “disparity” between the Rotten Tomatoes critics’ score and audience score for the movie “Reagan” was comparable to President Reagan’s landslide presidential win in 1980 as he recalled his books’ whirlwind ride to the theaters.

The year’s best reviewed films have been assembled, and the film, “Reagan,” has one of the biggest disparities in recent years — currently sitting at a 98% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes. That’s starkly different from the dismal critics’ score of 18%. 

A writer for The Boston Globe called it an “interminable hagiography” and “a wretched 2½ -hour bore that’s uncurious about its subject.” A Washington Post critic called it “worthless” as a piece of history, while the Daily Beast called it the worst movie of the year.

Kengor said the disparity between the audience and critics’ reviews reminded him of the 1980 presidential election, which Reagan won in a landslide against Democratic incumbent President Jimmy Carter.

AUTHOR OF BOOKS THAT INSPIRED ‘REAGAN’ MOVIE SEES KEY COMPARISONS BETWEEN 2024 AND 1980

“Yeah, the disparity is really profound,” Kengor said of the reviews. “In fact, it reminds me of what happened in 1984 when Ronald Reagan won 49 out of 50 states, which is probably about 98% of the states. If you do the math on this, 49 of 50 states won about 60% of the vote, won the Electoral College 525 to 13. But you had these liberal critics who didn’t like him, and they were very much in the minority. And I tell my students today, I tell other people, when you meet some liberal professor who is slamming Ronald Reagan in the classroom, just say, ‘You know, professor, but how did the guy win 49 out of 50 states?’ Right? I mean, he was liked, he was always liked.”

‘REAGAN’ MOVIE BEATS BOX OFFICE EXPECTATIONS ON OPENING WEEKEND

Kengor further argued that many of those critics didn’t have the right perspective because they were born after Reagan’s presidency.

“A lot of those 18% – now some are fair-minded critics who didn’t like this or that about the film artistically … But a lot of them, when you read the reviews, they’re clearly partisan. They’re clearly ideological. And it struck me that – I looked up some of the reviewers,” he said. “They were born after the Reagan years. And I think they just find it hard to imagine that there was a time in America when everybody liked the president. Even liberals who didn’t vote for him liked him. They liked him as a person.” 

Quaid said that Reagan endured difficulties similar to current American struggles prior to becoming president. (ShowBiz Direct)

The journey of “Reagan” to theaters began when filmmaker Mark Joseph called Kengor one day from Rock River, Illinois, where Reagan saved 77 lives when he served as a lifeguard, saying he was interested in turning “God and Ronald Reagan” into a movie. Kengor was interested in the idea, but suggested his book “The Crusader: Ronald Reagan and the Fall of Communism,” would make a more compelling film.

But it wasn’t until 20 years later that it would finally hit theaters.

A key factor in finally getting the movie off the ground, Kengor explained, was securing Dennis Quaid as the lead.

“You know, we had three or four really big names promising at different points – and any of which would have been quite good,” he said. “And then at one point, Dennis Quaid was available, interested. Mark Joseph reached out to him. They took him to the Reagan Ranch in Santa Barbara. And there they put him in the cowboy hat and then the denim kind of jacket, Reagan Ranch jacket.”

DENNIS QUAID THRILLS LOCALS IN DIXON, ILL., FOR ‘REAGAN’ PREMIERE, SAYS HOLLYWOOD ‘FORGOT’ ABOUT SMALL TOWNS

Kengor said a friend who had been previously critical of their movie process called him to say congratulations, and it was a “done deal.” That’s when Kengor said he realized how the industry worked. But the author said he was blown away by Quaid’s performance.

“I can’t imagine that any of them would have been better than Dennis Quaid,” he said. “I really just marvel at how he nailed Reagan – the voice, the face, even the passion, the enthusiasm. All along, the trickiest thing was going to be to get someone to play Reagan who didn’t look like he was doing a parody of Reagan.”

Many moviegoers agreed with Kengor’s assessment, according to the high audience score.

(Original Caption) Washington: President Reagan joins Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger (R), and others as they laugh at a remark made by Vice president George Bush, (L), prior to a Cabinet meeting 11/13. This is the first Cabinet meeting since President Reagan’s reelection. (Getty)

Kengor said he couldn’t wrap his head around how many liberals call for “unity,” yet when a movie comes along that does just that, they don’t want it.

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“So we give them this really positive movie about unity, which is what they claim they want,” he said.

“And they hate it, they hate it. They call it a hagiography, a movie about a saint. Well, it has a happy ending. We won the Cold War. We didn’t have nuclear war,” he said. “So a lot of the critics in those very low Rotten Tomatoes reviews, they just seem incredulous at the very idea that there was a time in America like this.”

Fox News Digital’s Hannah Lambert contributed to this report.

Kraven the Hunter, 2024.

Directed by J.C. Chandor.
Starring Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Ariana DeBose, Fred Hechinger, Russell Crowe, Alessandro Nivola, Christopher Abbott, Levi Miller, Billy Barratt, Diaana Babnicova, Chi Lewis-Parry, Michael Shaeffer, Dritan Kastrati, and Murat Seven.

SYNOPSIS:

Kraven’s complex relationship with his ruthless father, Nikolai Kravinoff, starts him down a path of vengeance with brutal consequences, motivating him to become not only the greatest hunter in the world, but also one of its most feared.

At one point during Kraven the Hunter (coming from A Most Violent Year‘s J.C. Chandor of all filmmakers), one of the several villains (I won’t specify which) delivers a hilariously eccentric line reading of “Get to the part where I should give a shit,” which sums the experience up. It’s hard to be convinced that Sony is instructing these filmmakers to try capturing something that resembles competent storytelling, compelling conflict, and human-sounding dialogue. However, chasing insanity isn’t necessarily working for Sony’s Spider-Man Universe (now seemingly dead, and going out with a whimper here); these films don’t make an impression beyond stunning stupidity, intentional or not.

That line especially sticks out since, for a film with magical potions (from underdeveloped minority characters serving the arc of a white hero nonetheless), a comically over-the-top punishing father played by Russell Crowe putting on a Russian accent and dialect that makes him come across like a Simpsons “in Russia, car drives you!” meme come to life, a human who has undergone a procedure for hardened rhinoceros skin rendering him impervious to bullets, and a time-stopping gifted assassin, Kraven the Hunter is an interminable slog that no amount of gratuitously entertaining R-rated violence can elevate.

It begins in medias res with a prison break-in and subsequent hit, presumably because the filmmakers (the script comes from Richard Wenk, Art Marcum, and Matt Holloway) know that the childhood origin story to the actual origin story unfolding is also quite boring, filled with setup for a plot containing an excessive amount of characters, most of them villains, working across elaborate schemes and betrayals that don’t register, mainly because it’s unclear what anyone actually wants, other than vague gestures of power and control over mysterious businesses. Yes, I could go to Wikipedia and research more about the Kraven bloodline and family business since the movie isn’t concerned with making it clear what any of these people are running, doing, and what they want, but why the hell should I do the work for the filmmakers?

What can be gathered is that Sergei Kravinoff’s (Levi Miller as a teenager, Aaron Taylor-Johnson as the adult antihero alter ego Kraven) hunting-obsessed father Nikolai (Russell Crowe) is heartless, asserting that he and his half-brother Dmitri’s (Billy Barratt as a young child, Fred Hechinger in the present day) mom took her life because she was mentally ill; it had nothing to do with him being a ruthless monster. Nikolai doesn’t want his boys to grow up weak or let America make them soft, so he instills hunting into them, proclaiming that one becomes a legend from killing notable beasts. Dmitri doesn’t exactly approve of this, but he is a pushover with loyalty to his father, even if he struggles to live up to such vile masculinity. Meanwhile, Sergei questions the fairness of using firearms while expressing an objection to the poaching period.

This probably makes Kraven the Hunter sound on the right track to tensely exploring toxic family dynamics and perhaps the general consequences of hunting animals for sport. Still, it’s also shockingly quick to do away with those themes in favor of several other subplots overstuffed with ability-enhanced characters. One doesn’t expect realism in a story about a boy mauled by a lion who is then discovered and given a magic potion by Ariana DeBose’s mystical Calypso, which not only miraculously heals his inner wounds but gives him animalistic traits, including the ability to catlike scale walls as if it’s all a parkour performance, but it’s reasonable to expect something to engage with and care about among the absurdity.

From there, Sergei runs away from home and apparently becomes Kraven over the years, protecting a personal piece of land shared with his beloved mother and murdering any poachers who stumble into the area. Meanwhile, Calypso has become a lawyer by day, with Kraven reuniting with her and looking to strike up a beneficial partnership; she provides him the locations of targets the law struggles to punish, and he kills them. That is also not a flawed premise, but again, so many generically motivated villains and ridiculous plot swerves come into play that it’s as if Sony or the filmmakers knew they were only going to get to make one of these, so they decided to cram three movies into one.

Although the film constantly throws Kraven from location to location with all the grace of whiplash or a video game abruptly jumping to the next level with only a 30-second cut scene in between, there is a healthy amount of bloody violence here. Such action sequences are poorly edited together with a distractingly high amount of cuts and typically never feel like they have gotten underway before they are over, but at the very least, the filmmakers understand this should be a graphic affair that doesn’t hold back on colorful stabbings. Similarly, the animal CGI leaves much to be desired (one wonders if Disney chose to release Mufasa a week after this under the impression that the quality can only go up from here), often leaving Aaron Taylor-Johnson looking ridiculous, such as an interaction showing that he can wrestle a lion to the ground, demonstrating a playful bond.

The issue is that the above craziness is stuck inside exhaustively formulaic plotting. Aaron Taylor-Johnson is not only a dud in the lead role but also has a good chunk of screen time taken away from competing villains that range from his aforementioned father, Alessandro Nivola’s Rhino, and Christopher Abbott’s time-bending hitman The Foreigner, all of whom are incomplete characters. Nothing is interesting to note about them other than that their allegiances consistently shift, spinning the wheels of incomprehensible storytelling aside from being able to tell who viewers should be rooting for. Viewers should also crave more from Kraven the Hunter. Hunt for better movies.

Flickering Myth Rating – Film: ★ ★ / Movie: ★ ★

Robert Kojder is a member of the Chicago Film Critics Association and the Critics Choice Association. He is also the Flickering Myth Reviews Editor. Check here for new reviews, follow my Twitter or Letterboxd, or email me at MetalGearSolid719@gmail.com



There’s no denying that Chris Rock is a comedy legend, but that’s not because of the time he spent on “Saturday Night Live” from 1990 to 1993.

The former cast member, who rocketed to stardom post-”SNL” with his blistering stand-up comedy, returned to host for the fourth time this week. This time out, he made the biggest impact in his barbed and topical monologue and in a couple of pre-taped pieces — not in the live sketches, where he seemed slow to react or have difficulty reading lines off cue cards.

Even with those issues, Rock still managed to sell the first main sketch of the night, about a Christmas mall elf giving parents the uncomfortable choice between a white Santa (James Austin Johnson) and a Black Santa (Devon Walker) for their kids. It was similar in vibe to the video “Grandpa’s Magic Car,” about a Herbie-like 1950s car that has human-esque qualities but also happens to be racist. Rock’s brief appearance in a video about a tedious office Christmas party also worked well.

Less successful: a Secret Santa sketch that pivoted on the gift of making Rock look like a “Simpsons” character; one about two men from the same building (Rock and Kenan Thompson) accused of sexually harassing employees; and a late-in-the-show sketch about a man hijacking someone else’s blind date with Ego Nwodim’s character.

The biggest surprise, one that perked up an otherwise mixed bag of an episode, was Adam Sandler showing up as the patient in a surgery sketch. He bleeds all over cast members Emil Wakim, Sarah Sherman, Nwodim and Bowen Yang as well as Rock while breaking the fourth wall and commenting on the show. It was unclear how much of that was improvised, but it sure seemed like Sandler was having a good time trying to make Rock break character.

Musical guest Gracie Abrams gave two solid performances in her “SNL” debut with songs “That’s So True” and “I Love You, I’m Sorry.”

Nancy Grace, the host of YouTube’s “Crime Stories With Nancy Grace,” has been an “SNL” mainstay since long before YouTube even existed. She was previously played by cast members Ana Gasteyer and Amy Poehler, but now Sarah Sherman has taken over the role and given Grace a hugely exaggerated drawl and a more manic demeanor. In the show’s cold open, she called Luigi Mangione, the suspect in the killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, a “Mordoror” and chastised America for making the suspected killer a sex symbol. Grace mocked Mangione for looking like “Dave Franco with Eugene Levy’s eyebrows” and revealed that she wants a “Ghost gun” like the one allegedly used in the crime because, “Every night I wake up to Jon Benet’s spirit screaming, ‘You used me!’” Because it’s on YouTube, her show kept getting interrupted by ads for supplement pills.

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When Chris Rock started his monologue, the comedian sounded out of breath, as if he’d run up flights of stairs at 30 Rock to get to the stage. But he settled in before too long after congratulating producer Lorne Michaels on “25 great years of ‘Saturday Night Live’” — on the occasion of its 50th anniversary. From there, Rock bore down on targets including Mangione (“If he looked like Jonah Hill… they’d already have given him the chair”), Mike Tyson’s boxing opponent Jake Paul (“Is this what the white man has reduced himself to? Who’s he going to fight next, Morgan Freeman?”) and president-elect Donald Trump’s amazing year (“It could happen to a nicer guy”).

The monologue got thornier as it went, with Rock speculating on American presidents who could be considered rapists (“You know how many rapists are in my wallet right now? A cup of coffee in America costs seven rapists”) and about which Latinos Trump might deport. “J. Lo’s gonna marry Ben (Affleck) again just so she can stay in the country,” he said. “I know she’s not Mexican… but Trump doesn’t know that.” If it lacked the thoughtful sharpness of his best stand-up, the monologue was at least a reminder that when he gets in a groove, Rock takes no prisoners.

Best sketch of the night: The office Christmas party starts at 5:45 p.m. on a Tuesday

The lameness of office holiday parties is well-trod comedic territory, but this pre-taped sketch hit all the right notes on why keeping employees who only know each other through work together after hours is a bad idea. From the laptop-music fail to the revelation of OnlyFans accounts to “The soggiest food you’ve ever seen… so wet,” the video used awkward zoom-ins and a wide variety of characters to get its point across, the high point being Rock and Nwodim playing a married couple who get into an argument about the husband’s “work wife.” Best detail? The 45-minute Secret Santa with a giant white board chart that seems to never end.

Also good: The surgery is terrible, but stay for the bleeding

What started off as a sketch about a hapless assistant named Leslie (Sherman) messing up a gallbladder procedure morphed into something completely different when former “SNL” cast member Sandler was revealed to be the patient under the sheet. After a few moments of technical difficulties, Sandler was able to get a blood squirter working and doused everyone else, including his former castmate Rock. It was one of those moments that got funnier the longer it went on, with Sandler riffing and nobody exactly sure what to do next. It’s hard to fake that kind of spontaneity and in Sandler’s (bloody) hands, the sketch went from a potential miss to something with real viral potential.

‘Weekend Update’ winner: How many bald jokes is too many bald jokes?

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New cast member Jane Wickline performed a clever and funny song about why people don’t speculate about pop singer Sabrina Carpenter’s sexuality. But as smart as it was, it couldn’t shine quite as brightly as Andrew Dismukes’ head as he played a hairless man reveling in a months-old case from England in which calling a man “Bald” could constitute sexual harassment. Dismukes advised “Weekend Update” co-host Colin Jost that “My eyes are down here” and recounted the time he was on a jury with 11 other bald men and they were described as looking like a carton of eggs. This could have been just a string of bald jokes, but Dismukes has a way of playing this type of character with absolute seriousness. Let’s just say he did a good job getting into the character’s, uh… headspace.