Movies I will die on a hill defending that everyone else hated

There’s a specific kind of rage that only activates when someone dismisses a movie you love. Not the polite ‘oh, I didn’t really get it’ dismissal. The full-on ‘that movie was terrible and everyone agrees’ dismissal. As if consensus is the same thing as truth.

It’s not.

Some films got buried by bad marketing, a distracted press cycle, or audiences who walked in expecting something else entirely and then punished the movie for not being that thing. I’ve been collecting receipts for years. This is me cashing them in.

Does Speed Racer (2008) deserve a full apology from everyone? Yes. Obviously yes.

Speed Racer got obliterated by critics who had already decided the Wachowskis couldn’t follow up The Matrix — and they took it out on a movie that was never even trying to be The Matrix. It’s a kaleidoscopic, hyper-saturated fever dream made entirely on purpose. The whole point is that it looks like a cartoon exploded into real life. That’s not a flaw. That’s the movie.

Audiences showed up expecting something grounded and got something electric instead. That’s not the movie’s problem.

Here’s the thing nobody really talks about: there’s something genuinely hard about writing a story where the best solution to every problem is just being the fastest one there. That could get exhausting fast. The Wachowskis actually understood Speed Racer — they made speed feel like a moral position, not just a plot device. The family dynamics are warm in a way you don’t expect. Emile Hirsch is doing real work in there. A 41% on Rotten Tomatoes is a cultural crime I think about more than I should.

It’s been getting its flowers on social media for the better part of a decade now. Told you.

Was Practical Magic (1998) actually bad, or did critics just hate women having fun?

Practical Magic landed with a 21% critic score — twenty-one percent — and I genuinely don’t know what movie those people watched. Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman as witch sisters with a generational curse, a gothic New England aesthetic, Stockard Channing and Dianne Wiest being perfect in every single scene, and a villain who is legitimately terrifying?

That’s not a bad movie. That’s a movie critics decided wasn’t serious enough to take seriously.

It found its audience eventually — in the whole cult classic conversation we’ve been having about it for the last decade — but it deserved better in 1998. It still deserves better now. A whole generation of devoted fans found it on cable at 2am, and those people know what’s up.

Treasure Planet (2002) is one of Disney’s best and nobody was paying attention

Treasure Planet came out the same year as Lilo & Stitch, and Disney had already mentally checked out on it before it even opened. The marketing was confusing, the release was quiet, and the film — a genuinely gorgeous, emotionally devastating sci-fi reimagining of Treasure Island — got lost in the shuffle.

Jim Hawkins is one of the most fully realized Disney protagonists ever written. The relationship between him and John Silver lands harder than most films made specifically to make you cry. The hand-drawn-meets-CGI animation is stunning even now.

This one isn’t even controversial anymore. Most people who’ve actually seen it agree it’s great. The problem is nobody saw it.

Why did everyone decide Interstellar was overrated?

Okay, Interstellar wasn’t a bomb — it made money. But the pile-on that followed, the years of ‘actually it’s overrated’ takes, the smug ‘the science is wrong’ dismissals — it wore me down.

Astrophysicists have noted that the black hole rendering — done in collaboration with physicist Kip Thorne — was so accurate it contributed to actual published research. So. The science discourse around this movie was almost entirely bad faith.

It’s a film about love as a physical force, about time as grief, about parents and children and the things we’d break the universe to get back. The third act is strange and bold and swings for something most blockbusters wouldn’t dare attempt. That’s worth defending.

Was 21 Jump Street (2012) actually supposed to be good? Because it was great.

21 Jump Street is the funniest movie Channing Tatum has ever made, and I will not be taking questions. Nobody — and I mean nobody — saw that coming. A reboot of an 80s TV show, Jonah Hill and Channing Tatum as buddy-cop misfits going back to high school undercover. It sounds like something you’d find in a discount bin.

Instead it’s sharp, self-aware, and genuinely hilarious in a way that most comedies of that era weren’t. The chemistry between Hill and Tatum is effortless. The movie knows exactly how dumb its premise is and uses that as the joke instead of running from it. That’s hard to pull off.

It got decent reviews when it came out, but the discourse has always treated it like a guilty pleasure instead of just a pleasure. Drop the guilt. It’s a well-made comedy that understood its assignment completely.

Jupiter Ascending (2015) knew exactly what it was — and so do I

This is the hill. This is the one I will actually die on.

Jupiter Ascending is a gloriously maximalist, completely unhinged sci-fi space opera in which Mila Kunis discovers she’s space royalty, Eddie Redmayne whispers his way through a villain performance with full commitment, and Channing Tatum rollerblades through the sky on anti-gravity boots. It is camp. It is intentional. It is extraordinary.

The movie got savaged for being too much — too weird, too busy, too earnest. But earnest camp done with a $175 million budget is rare. We should have been celebrating it instead of running it out of theaters.

I’ve had the Jupiter Ascending is actually good argument more times than I can count. I never lose. The people who hate it haven’t rewatched it. That’s the whole thing.

The strongest case against me — and why I still disagree

There’s a reasonable position here, and I’ll give it a fair shake. It goes like this: these movies failed because they have real structural problems — pacing issues, tonal inconsistency, or they asked audiences to work too hard without enough payoff. Critics aren’t always lazy. Sometimes a movie just doesn’t land.

Fair. I’ll give you that Interstellar’s ending requires patience most blockbuster audiences weren’t prepared to give. I’ll acknowledge Jupiter Ascending is not for everyone and that’s not a character flaw, it’s just a taste thing.

But what I won’t give you is the idea that Rotten Tomatoes scores represent some objective truth about a film’s value. Critical consensus is shaped by the press cycle, the cultural moment, the expectations set by marketing, and — honestly — by groupthink. A 21% doesn’t mean a movie is bad. It means a lot of critics agreed with each other, and critics run in packs.

But what do I know? I also think jalapeño cream cheese belongs on pretzels and I don’t trust anyone who disagrees with me about that either.

Time is the best film critic there is. The movies that get dismissed in their moment and then slowly, quietly build real audiences — those are the ones worth paying attention to. Don’t let a score make the decision for you before you’ve sat down in the dark and given something a real chance.

I’m not telling you what to love. That’s not the point of any of this.

The point is that ‘everyone hated it’ has never once been a good reason to skip something. Especially when ‘everyone’ turns out to be a room full of critics on deadline who’d already made up their minds.

Sit with the weird ones. The ones that swung too big and missed — or maybe didn’t miss at all. Some of the best things I’ve ever watched were things someone told me weren’t worth my time.

📌 Pin this post