This has a reputation as being one of the worst films of all time. It is the 40th Worst Movie according to IMBD. But, like so many Hollywood films that are considered among the worst of all time, it’s only one of the worst movies of all time if you’ never seen truly terrible films.

There are absolutely some terrible things about this movie. For a major release featuring a major Hollywood star, it has a remarkable number of continuity errors and other quality issues. In one scene, for example, the cast wear the clothes they wore the previous day. It seems nobody realized the scene took place on the next day. And there are a lot of these types of errors. Far more than you would expect for a film with a $100 million budget in 2004. (Adjusting for inflation, you could say it is one of the worst movies ever made within its budget range.)

The effects have dated really horribly and it says something not very good about the director that a man who made his career as a visual effects supervisor made a film that looks this bad. Maybe it didn’t look this bad in 2004 but, in 2022, the animation looks like animation, to the point that entire shots are just cartoonish.

The other thing is that, occasionally, the camera work is cartoonish. Rather, it’s like he’s trying to make the movie look like a video game. Particularly in the weird basketball dance scene, the camera angles are just bonkers and disorienting. As I’ve said many times, I’m all for inventive camera work in good films. In bad films, it’s not a positive. And here, it’s headache inducing. I literally stopped looking at the screen during the basketball dance scene because I was so annoyed.

But! The script is arguably better than Batman & Robin and possibly even Batman Forever. And, aside from the scene in which Halle Berry somehow fails to kick Sharon Stone’s ass for a few minutes, the plot is more reasonable than the stupidity in those two Schumacher Batman films.

It’s bad. It’s really not very good. But if you think this is the worst movie of all time. I have probably 100 movies to show you. At least.

2/10