Great 2000s Movies That Got Bad Reviews

I love film critics and I love reading film criticism. They and it are the reason I got into this line of work in the first place. (Well, that and I always hoped as young boy that if I worked hard enough and got good grades I could someday eat three different kinds of Indiana Jones French toast in one sitting.)

So when I do a piece like this, a piece on good movies released from 2000 to 2009 that got mixed to bad reviews, it’s not meant as a gotcha to critics. Those writers did their job, and they are more than entitled to their opinions, even if I happen to disagree with them in these specific examples. I do it because criticism isn’t just about “criticizing” movies. It’s also about defending the films you like, even in the face of a negative consensus.

The 15 movies below all have “rotten” scores (59 or below) on the review aggregation website Rotten Tomatoes. They are listed in descending order, from the ones given a pass by around half of critics and then going down to the ones that almost no one liked.

Some of the films on this list were hits; the critics were, in a sense, in the minority in those cases. In others, critics and audiences voted thumbs down — and I am in the minority. Or maybe you agree with me. Or maybe you’re compelled to try one of these movies for the first time after the bad reviews kept you away. That alone would make this a worthwhile piece of film criticism.