When Roger Ebert hated a film, he went straight for the jugular in his review. He was never one for tempering his bad reviews by giving the filmmakers the benefit of the doubt or holding off on harsh criticism because making movies is hard work. Instead, he would concoct a review so scathing and so scabrous that it became a hilarious joy to read. It was like car crash television, but in the written form: you couldn’t look away, even if you wanted to. Amusingly, one of his most damning verdicts was written about a 1997 comedy that he felt contained not one solitary laugh.
The background of this classic Ebert takedown goes back to 1980 when Leslie Nielsen was approached by Jim Abrahams, David Zucker, and Jerry Zucker about starring in their spoof disaster movie Airplane! At that point, Nielsen was best known as a serious actor with a career stretching back to the 1950s. He had lent his particular brand of po-faced gravitas to classic films like Forbidden Planet, The Poseidon Adventure, and The Plainsman, but now he was being asked to turn his talents to comedy.
In a 1993 Fresh Air interview, Nielsen remembered, “They had written something that was just wonderfully dumb and funny. And they knew that if [we] approached their material with the same seriousness and the same gravity with which we approached our police television shows that we were doing, that it would be very funny.”
Airplane! was a huge hit, giving Nielsen a late-career surge as Hollywood’s premiere purveyor of deadpan comedy that peaked with The Naked Gun series. He would play his characters completely straight, blissfully unaware of the ridiculous things happening around them, and the fact that he wasn’t trying to be funny made everything he said hysterical.
Unfortunately, though, after the third Naked Gun movie in 1994, Nielsen’s iron grip as the king of spoofs began to slip. Films like Dracula: Dead and Loving It, Spy Hard, and Wrongfully Accused – which spoofed Bram Stoker’s Dracula, James Bond, and The Fugitive respectively – were critical duds, and only Spy Hard performed respectably at the box office.
In ’97, though, Nielsen’s career nosedive arguably hit its lowest point with Mr Magoo, a big-screen adaptation of a classic ’50s cartoon character. The animation’s main gag, doled out in six-minute theatrical shorts, was that Magoo was a wealthy, near-sighted elderly man whose vision issues constantly led him into comically dangerous situations. Thanks to his uncanny luck, though, he would always emerge unscathed from any perilous encounter, none-the-wiser about how close he came to death.
Translating this short format to feature length would be the main task facing Nielsen, director Stanley Tong and writers Pat Proft and Tom Sherohman – but, according to Ebert, they did a terrible job. Ebert lamented that Nielsen “does an imitation of the Magoo squint and the Magoo voice, but is unable to overcome the fact that a little Magoo at six minutes in a cartoon is a far different matter than a lot of Magoo at 90 minutes in a feature. This is a one-joke movie without the joke.”
While Ebert admitted he was never a fan of the Mr Magoo cartoons, he still expected better from the film, and it let him down at every turn. He raged that the film was “transcendently bad. It soars above ordinary badness as the eagle outreaches the fly. There is not a laugh in it. Not one. I counted.” Most of all, though, Ebert was disappointed in Nielsen’s inability to raise any mirth with the character. However, he did wonder if it may have been impossible for any actor to succeed in such an ill-advised project.
Ultimately, Ebert’s only chuckle in the cinema wasn’t generated by any of the slapstick nonsense on-screen. Instead, he got a good laugh from a disclaimer that closes the film, assuring audiences that Mr Magoo “is not intended as an accurate portrayal of blindness or poor eyesight”. The incredulous critic couldn’t quite believe that Disney felt the need to include such a note, and he let the disclaimer’s writer have it with both barrels.
Ebert concluded: “I think we should stage an international search to find one single person who thinks the film is intended as such a portrayal, and introduce that person to the author of the disclaimer, as they will have a lot in common, including complete detachment from reality.”
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