In Defense of Defending Indefensible Movies

Talk movies with me for longer than five minutes and some trash treasure is going to crawl out of my mouth.

I don’t plan it. The conversation drifts toward movies, the way all decent conversations eventually should, and suddenly I’m explaining why Movie 43 still makes me laugh like an idiot.

Yes, I know. It’s sophomoric. Sometimes it’s problematic. It has enough famous people in it to feel like a bona fide blackmail situation. I understand every charge against it, and I still laugh my ass off.

Then Batman & Robin comes up, and I’m already halfway into an argument about why that glowing aquarium of bad decisions still works on me.

The condemned movie enters the room, and there I am, clearing my throat for the defense.

My default setting with movies is generosity, more often than not. Maybe that sounds self-righteous. That’s fine. I’m comfortable with the risk.

I like most movies. My Letterboxd account probably looks like I’m grading on a curve after being slipped a twenty in the parking lot. I can usually find something worthwhile: a weird performance, a strong practical effect, one good scene, an actor swinging so hard the movie has to duck.

That doesn’t mean I’m wandering around giving every movie a hug just because someone finished it. I hate movies too. I walked out of Iron Lung recently, which I’ve only done twice in my life. Not because it was cheap. Not because it was small. Because I was bored out of my skull.

Boring is unforgivable. And when I say boring, I don’t mean slow. Slow can actually be great. It can hypnotize you, punish you, and pay you back two hours later with interest. A boring movie just sits there, breathing through its mouth.

The movies I defend have to give me something. They can be broken, tacky, stupid, underwritten, badly acted, morally suspect, or, in the case of Batman & Robin, dressed entirely in rubber nipples. They just can’t be lifeless.

I’ll keep standing up for that neon disaster before I waste breath on some franchise errand that showed up to fill a release calendar. (Looking at you, Disney.) At least it’s alive in a way a lot of modern franchise product is too scared to be. It’s a glossy, expensive, late-’90s mutation of the old Batman TV show, all Day-Glo Gotham and blockbuster money with no adult supervision. The actors launch choices into orbit. Uma Thurman plays Poison Ivy like subtlety had already been murdered in the parking lot. Mr. Freeze delivers ice pun after ice pun, and God help me, I remain powerless against them.

Give me a disaster with personality over a respectable nothing.

The biggest mistake you can make when recommending a bad movie is pretending it isn’t one.

If most people hate it, say that. If it’s trashy, say that. If it’s terrible but somehow still worth seeing, say that too. I feel less like I’ve committed a social crime when I hand someone the correct warning label first.

With the right friend, I can recommend Megalopolis by saying, “Jon Voight boner arrow. That is all.”

That only works with people who already know what kind of illness I’m carrying. For anyone else, I’m giving more context. I’m telling them Francis Ford Coppola sold off a huge piece of his wine company to fund this nonsense, and what we got feels like forty years of stoned Coppola thoughts, each one somehow granted its own building permit.

Watching it feels like touring a building that failed every inspection. Every room is unsafe. Somehow, you keep walking.

Hard Ticket to Hawaii is easier. Yes, it’s trashy. But someone hits a skateboarding assassin with a car, sends him flying through the air, and blows him out of the sky with a rocket launcher. Then the blow-up doll he was carrying gets the same rocket-launcher treatment. And that’s only one scene.

I’m sorry, but at a certain point the defense rests.

Other movies need a different lens. Sometimes the pitch is just, “Pretend you’re ten years old again.” That’s how I’d tell someone to watch Masters of the Universe (1987). I’m not saying it’s great. I’m saying it’s better than people give it credit for, Frank Langella delivers a perfect performance as Skeletor, and as an ‘80s time-capsule movie for kids, it does just fine. If you meet it on that level, it’s well worth the watch.

Same with Mortal Kombat (1995). Christopher Lambert as Raiden is a glaring problem, but the movie is still fun. The fights work. Some of the effects still hold up. Watch it like you’re young enough to care more about the tournament than the adaptation choices, and it still has the goods.

Know who you’re recommending it to. Tell them what kind of mess they’re walking into. Hand them the right lens. After that, the movie is responsible for itself.

Now is probably a good time to mention that I’ve been guilty of misreading the room. Badly, and on more than one occasion.

When I was twenty, I put Meet the Feebles on at a party as background noise, which is a choice you make when you’re young, stupid, and a little too proud of your DVD collection. Within thirty minutes, someone yelled, “What the FUCK is this? Turn that shit off,” and the DVD got pulled from the player.

That one was on me. Peter Jackson’s earlier gross-out cult films are not for mixed company.

Part of me hoped someone would recognize it and yell, “Holy shit, Meet the Feebles!” Then I could talk to another damaged film freak and feel seen. Another part of me wanted it to offend people. I wanted them to sit there and deal with it because I was twenty and a complete ass clown.

That shame is funny now because I earned it. The version that still pisses me off is different.

When friends gang up on me for liking something, I don’t fold. I start checking their shelves.

Everybody has some dumb movie they’ve quietly protected for years. Some cheap sequel, some ugly comedy, some bargain-bin oddity they imprinted on before taste turned into a personality contest.

What stings is how selective the rules get. Their awful thing is nostalgia. Their bottom-shelf favorite is “you had to be there.” Their childhood embarrassment is comfort food. Mine is apparently a cry for help.

Convenient.

I usually understand why people hate the movies I defend. I hear the complaints. Sometimes I agree with every one of them. The acting is rough. The tone is confused. The jokes aged like milk in the glove compartment of a car parked in Arizona.

Fair enough. But a movie can be a mess and still be worth watching.

I can’t tell you a movie is objectively good or bad. Spoiler: “objectively” doesn’t exist in art. Never has. Never will. Stop dragging that word into arguments about movies like it proves anything.

I can tell you why I think it works, why it’s worth watching, why it fascinates me, or why it should be preserved somewhere between a museum and a crime scene. Your opinion belongs to you. Mine belongs to me. I’m not trying to win the argument. I’m trying to keep the conversation alive.

If your main contribution to movies is finding the flaw, congratulations. Very brave work.

What else did you find?

The film bro misery machine loses me right there. The “professional critic” posture. The Substack hall monitors. The Letterboxd assassins polishing their one-star reviews like ceremonial knives. The people who seem excited to dislike things because it either keeps their brand intact or helps justify their grating, therapy-deprived personality.

Movies have taken up an unreasonable amount of space in my life. Commentary tracks, making-of documentaries, deleted scenes, whatever was buried on Disc 2. I went to film school for two years before dropping out (twenty-year-old ass clown, remember). I made short films when I was younger, and still kind of do now, only it’s social media content for clients. I know how hard it is to finish anything.

A bad movie still means somebody dragged an impossible thing across the finish line, even if the final result looks like nobody should admit that. Some cared. Some failed. Some made the wrong choice with absolute conviction, which is often more interesting than the right choice made by committee.

Tell me you hated the movie. I can handle that. Tell me it was stupid, too loud, too cheap, too long, too in love with its own nonsense. Fine. We can still have a good conversation.

The little throne routine gets old fast.

If someone has watched widely, thought deeply, and developed a real point of view, great. Pull up a chair. Let’s ruin dinner by talking about movies for three hours. But if “refined taste” just means you’ve trained yourself to enjoy less and look down on more, I’m not lining up to kiss the ring.

If my affection for Movie 43, Batman & Robin, or Hard Ticket to Hawaii makes you see me as less serious, I don’t think I’m the one who lost the plot. It must be exhausting to miss out on that much fun and call the emptiness “standards.”

Some people have turned movie taste into a contest to see who can be the least impressed. They treat every imperfect movie like it broke into their house at 3 a.m. and took a shit in their refrigerator. They call it discernment. I call it sad.

If your taste has locked you in a prison where every bad line, strange choice, or deranged performance exists only to prove how smart you are, I don’t envy you. I pity you. There are too many weird, defective, fascinating movies out there to spend your life guarding the door like joy might sneak past you.

I’d rather be the person still looking for the part worth saving. The scene nobody responsible would’ve approved. The disaster that keeps finding new ways to be watchable.

They can keep their diamond-encrusted opinion.

I’m going in.