Kim Kardashian’s world-historically horrendous TV show All’s Fair has detonated a firestorm of critical horror which, as well as everything else, may have undermined the currency of the star-rating review economy. My colleague Lucy Mangan gave Kardashian’s show an all-but-unprecedented zero stars and zero stars are in fact very rare on this paper.
Yet perhaps in the post-Kardashian world they will become more commonplace. I actually have the distinction of giving the first zero star review in the Guardian’s history — for Cuba Gooding’s terrible comedy Boat Trip back in 2002. But it’s weird. There have been worse films than that which didn’t get zeroed. Not many. But some.
Maybe the pure trauma of Boat Trip caused me both to award no stars and blitz all memory of having done so, because until re-reading that review I’d thought I’d stuck to the parameters of the five-star system, five for the best and one for the worst. (And I am actually the only broadsheet critic in captivity who likes the star system because it prevents reviewers superciliously sitting on the fence.)
Among the worst experiences of my life … Tom Green in Freddy Got Fingered. Photograph: Chris Helcermanas-Benge/Associated Press
Giving zero stars, I’d always assumed, was the negative equivalent of Spinal Tap guitarist Nigel Tufnel cranking his amp to 11. What was the point? One is the worst. Isn’t it? If you give zero stars, why not give six stars at the other end? Or seven stars, as if you’re reviewing a luxury hotel in Dubai?
And once zero stars becomes the norm, someone is going to give minus one or minus two. Like Weimar citizens during hyperinflation, critics will be wheeling barrowloads of valueless minus 38-star reviews to the publishing marketplace, to find someone has given a minus 39. If zero stars is to be the new benchmark of critical spleen, perhaps it’s the time for a reset moment; critics will have to issue a new star rating system, like the new French franc in 1960.
Reduced me to a nervous breakdown … The Incredible Hulk. Photograph: Marvel Studios/Allstar
So anyway. If zero stars is the new normal for critical rage, then so be it. Here are the ones who deserve the big 0, 1-star movies from which I am now ceremoniously reducing the rating to nul points. (You will have to imagine in the film’s director and producer on some bleak military parade ground, their heads bowed, as to a rattling drum roll I rip away their single star.)
In describing the 2001 grossout comedy Freddy Got Fingered I said it had “been hailed as the 21st century’s worst movie; I think it is the 21st century’s worst cultural artefact. Watching it was among the worst experiences of my life, up there with having a quarter of millimetre shaved off my upper molar without anaesthetic by an eccentric dentist when I was 15.”
Louis Letterier’s mindblowingly badly acted The Incredible Hulk reduced me a virtual nervous breakdown.
But the gold medal for zero stars, for pure moviemaking horror, goes to Julia Roberts’s interminable self-help spiritual journey in the 2010 film Eat Pray Love. Here is the review I wrote at the time, and I can feel myself worrying that zero is generous.
