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.

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“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.”

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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.”

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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



The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim, 2024.

Directed by Kenji Kamiyama.
Featuring the voice talents of Brian Cox, Gaia Wise, Luke Pasqualino, Miranda Otto, Christopher Lee, Lorraine Ashbourne, Yazdan Qafouri, Benjamin Wainwright, Laurence Ubong Williams, Shaun Dooley, Jude Akuwudike, Michael Wildman, Bilal Hasna, and Janine Duvitski.

SYNOPSIS:

A sudden attack by Wulf, a clever and ruthless Dunlending lord seeking vengeance for the death of his father, forces Helm Hammerhand, the King of Rohan, and his people to make a daring last stand in the ancient stronghold of the Hornburg.

Despite the enticing novelty of strikingly colorful hand-drawn animation coming across as a blend between Western high fantasy and Japanese anime, director Kenji Kamiyama’s (working from a bloated yet lacking screenplay from the crowded team of Jeffrey Addiss, Will Matthews, Phoebe Gittins, and Arty Papageorgiou, with some of the characters here created by none other than J.R.R. Tolkien) The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim is disappointingly clichéd, dull, and bland.

The narrative doesn’t necessarily feel specific to The Lord of the Rings (even if there are some tie-ins, such as orcs looting rings or late, brief appearances from significant characters of the franchise), but more so a tale of war and feminism empowerment that could have been from a separate universe if not for a couple of familiar characters and locales present here. It’s one of those situations where, if one changes around a small number of names, locations, and lore, what’s left is blueprint generic fantasy.

The screenplay is so concerned with action and the ensuing war (which isn’t necessarily inherently a bad thing) that the depth it gives to lead heroine Hera (voiced by Gaia Wise), daughter of Rohan king Helm Hammerhand (a name fans will instantly register, lent the distinct voice of Brian Cox), is that she is wild and rebellious while having an almost-telepathic connection to animals, whether it be her trusty horse or birds she helps in her free time. Once that five minutes of introductory exposition is out of the way, the political intrigue and backstabbing begin, with Helm betrayed by the Dunderlings.

After disagreements about alliances and how to handle an impending “long winter,” giving the feeling that the filmmakers are also going for a Game of Thrones feel, their leader challenges Helm to one-on-one combat, where he dies from one punch. This leaves his son, Wulf (voiced by Luke Pasqualino), a childhood friend of Hera, so enraged that the only thing on his mind is conquest and murder, to such a degree that the childhood friendship is never explored again. Meanwhile, Hera, who doesn’t consider herself a leader, wants to actively participate in defending her land but is quickly shut down by her father, who insists that she is to be protected whether she wants to be or not (which is uncomfortable and socially relevant rhetorical.)

As Wulf continues to start skirmishes and pick off Hera’s siblings (her cousin is also sent away for behaving in a manner Helm disapproves of), the conflict between daughter and father grows until the predictably inevitable occurs. He realizes the error of his ways and encourages her to be the warrior she has always meant to be, even if she is still uncertain about leaving the entire army and Shield Maidens (women who once protected this land when there were no more men soldiers left to do so.) The conversations between Hera and the latter are some of the most interesting segments, preparing the former to step into a larger role.

This is boilerplate material that the filmmakers hope to distract from with near-nonstop action. The problem is that most of those battle sequences are weightless since the characters are still thinly written (which is majorly frustrating, considering we know how compelling and emotionally absorbing stories within this franchise can be.) Even the animation, which is nice to look at, occasionally feels off and sluggish in motion. Unsurprisingly, the story doesn’t become engaging until Hera’s born leadership qualities, bravery, and physicality are put front and center, but that’s also after 90+ minutes of routine fantasy storytelling. The music (courtesy of Stephen Gallagher) is also flat, save for whenever the film pulls out a legacy piece from Howard Shore (and some beautiful ending credits songs.)

Apparently, The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim was fast-tracked into production so New Line could hold onto cinematic rights for novel adaptations. The result fits with that information, as much of what’s here feels hastily written and constructed without giving that narrative a second. It ends with a similar narration, mentioning that Hera is still wild and free as she starts on a solo adventure. One presumes a movie exclusively about her, separated from so much other political baggage and family drama, would have provided more refreshingly tantalizing opportunities, yielding something richer and more exhilarating.

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

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=embed/playlist