Comedy films aren’t always the most critically acclaimed. As we’ve pointed out, that’s not necessarily a reflection of how audiences as a whole feel about them. But getting paid to write a review of a movie at least gives you a little more incentive to sit through the whole thing than your average viewer. Everyone has their limits, though, and that’s why we wanted to explore which comedies critics decided to bail on before the credits started rolling. Here’s what we came up with.
4. Zoolander 2
As Leonard Maltin explained in 2016, he never used to walk out of movies because he felt that he couldn’t review them properly without seeing them from beginning to end. That all changed when he attended a press screening of Zoolander 2. For the first time in his career, Maltin left the theater less than an hour into a movie. While he’d found the first Zoolander funny, he immediately thought the sequel was annoying, stupid, and “filled with puerile and unfunny gags.” Maltin even went as far as to say of the experience, “Life is too short to spend two hours in a state of total exasperation.”
3. THE STATUE
Roger Ebert disliked the David Niven comedy The Statue so much that he referred to it as “one of the worst movies ever perpetrated.” The 1971 film, which features early appearances from Monty Python stars John Cleese and Graham Chapman, revolves around Niven’s character receiving a nude statue of himself with genitals that don’t match his own. Where the story goes from there is something Ebert never found out because he called it quits before things went much further. He closed out his short review of the film by saying that Niven looks “so uncomfortable you wish, for his sake, he were in another movie, or even unemployed.”
2. BLACK SHEEP
1996’s Black Sheep was the second and final film collaboration between Saturday Night Live stars and friends Chris Farley and David Spade. It was also the first movie Gene Siskel had walked out of since 1971. With about 20 minutes left, Siskel ducked out and pretended he was going to the bathroom. Later, on his show with Roger Ebert, he called Farley “a bad actor,” and said, “I have never seen him be funny with any script.” He went on to say that Farley “just runs around, screams, and rolls on the ground like a fat man.”
1. CLERKS II
Good Morning America’s Joel Siegel only made it 30 minutes into Clerks II before announcing his departure to the rest of the critics at the screening he attended. He reportedly stood up in the front row and yelled, “Time to go!” proclaiming that it was the first time in 30 years he’d walked out of a movie. Apparently, the first reference to a person having sex with a donkey was more than Siegel could handle. It’s probably a good thing for him, then, that he didn’t stay to see how the rest of that storyline played out.
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