Mark Olsen

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L.A. Weekly, Los Angeles Times
For 210 reviews, this critic has graded:
  • 50% higher than the average critic
  • 4% same as the average critic
  • 46% lower than the average critic
On average, this critic grades 9.2 points lower than other critics. (0-100 point scale)

Mark Olsen's Scores

  • Movies
  • TV
Average review score: 56
Highest review score: 100 Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets
Lowest review score: 0 21 and Over
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 81 out of 210
  2. Mixed: 91 out of 210
  3. Negative: 38 out of 210
210 movie reviews
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    • 24 Metascore
    • 20 Mark Olsen
    The New Guy
    Various actors deserving of better (including Zooey Deschanel, Eddie Griffin and Lyle Lovett) suffer through the undercooked material, while love interest Eliza Dushku gamely gets through both a bikini-modeling montage and a mechanical bull ride, but none of their efforts can save this film.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 30 Mark Olsen
    Paradise: Love
    The film is, perhaps, intended as a deadpan burlesque of race and class and beauty ideals...but it plays more as a boorish, overextended punch line.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 30 Mark Olsen
    Drumline
    It's like a musical with no big numbers, or an action film withholding the explosions.
    • 38 Metascore
    • 30 Mark Olsen
    Entourage
    That the bonds of friendship between Vince and his pals are predicated so strongly on excluding others feels regressive and drags the movie away from harmless high jinks into something needlessly more spiteful and ugly.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 30 Mark Olsen
    Lisa Picard Is Famous
    The makers of Lisa Picard Is Famous -- having mastered the obvious early on, set their sights on the unfunny and repetitive.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 30 Mark Olsen
    Extraction 2
    If the first film seemed indicative of much of what is wrong with movies in the streaming era, feeling inessential and disposable, a cog in a machine rather than something unique, “Extraction 2” is a snapshot of a sequel in this moment, bigger, expanded and even less necessary.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 30 Mark Olsen
    The Secret Disco Revolution
    The movie feels like a flakey, off-the-cuff blog post that somehow transmogrified itself into a feature-length documentary.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 30 Mark Olsen
    A Walk in the Woods
    Despite Redford's enthusiasm and best efforts, A Walk in the Woods is a tedious journey to nowhere special.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 30 Mark Olsen
    American Chai
    Chai's structure and pacing are disconcertingly slack. Missing the loose ends and ambiguities of actual conversation, the dialogue makes characters sound like they're delivering speeches rather than interacting.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 30 Mark Olsen
    Jobs
    There was a time when the slack storytelling, stock characterizations and general by-the-numbers feeling of the film could be put into perspective by saying it seemed like a TV biopic. But even TV movies are done with more verve than this these days.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 30 Mark Olsen
    Blood
    Blood feels perfunctory, needing something besides fussy plotting to jolt it to life.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 30 Mark Olsen
    Wish I Was Here
    For a film that purports to be about the process of maturity and growth, it is woefully un-evolved, lacking in understanding and insight.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 30 Mark Olsen
    The Young Unknowns
    By the time a not terribly surprising tragedy hits and these crazy kids get theirs, the movie doesn't so much end as finally keel over.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 30 Mark Olsen
    Eternal
    As the cop who finds himself in way over his head, kickboxer-turned-actor Conrad Pla turns in a performance of such staggering ineptitude that it almost (key word: almost) reaches a so-bad-it's-good, Plan 9 From Outer Space brilliance.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 30 Mark Olsen
    Joe Somebody
    It all misses the mark emotionally, hindered by one-dimensional characters and telegraphed developments.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 30 Mark Olsen
    Machete Kills
    Machete Kills winds up a slightly camp, tinny parody of bad action movies, playing out with the same sense of tedium as a genuine bad action movie.
    • 40 Metascore
    • 20 Mark Olsen
    Martin Lawrence Live: Runteldat
    It's Lawrence who throws Runteldat (as in "run and tell that") off key, repeating an admonition about "the trials and tribulations of life" that sounds suspiciously insincere coming, as it does, from a guy smothered in diamonds.
    • 39 Metascore
    • 20 Mark Olsen
    Mutant Aliens
    When Plympton isn't indulging his manias, the film just sort of nods off, and nothing much happens -- either visually or storywise -- for what seems like ages.
    • 38 Metascore
    • 30 Mark Olsen
    Terminator Genisys
    Terminator Genisys could be Exhibit A in why the current line of thinking in Hollywood regarding sequels/reboots/remakes often leads to terrible decisions and worse films.
    • 35 Metascore
    • 30 Mark Olsen
    Two Can Play That Game
    Ultimately neither freewheeling enough to work as a diverting entertainment nor barbed enough to strike home as any sort of social commentary.
    • 35 Metascore
    • 30 Mark Olsen
    Iowa
    Just because the filmmakers have their roots in the Midwest doesn't give them a pass when it comes to their stereotypical rendition of small-town people and ways, chock-a-block with sadistic cops, shotgun-toting locals, and strippers from up in Des Moines.
    • 34 Metascore
    • 20 Mark Olsen
    Copperhead
    Painfully lugubrious, any sting Copperhead might contain for its contrarian's view of history is undone by its wayward sense of storytelling.
    • 34 Metascore
    • 30 Mark Olsen
    Chelsea Walls
    Pretension, in its own way, is a form of bravery. For this reason and this reason only -- the power of its own steadfast, hoity-toity convictions -- Chelsea Walls deserves a medal.
    • 34 Metascore
    • 0 Mark Olsen
    21 and Over
    This is a movie that celebrates selfishness, stupidity and the mean-spirited insensitivity that goes along with it. We're better than this, America.
    • 33 Metascore
    • 30 Mark Olsen
    The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones
    The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones is just a sloppy rag bag of ideas cobbled from other stories.
    • 32 Metascore
    • 30 Mark Olsen
    The Rising Place
    As a first-time filmmaker who juggles such duties as writing, directing, producing, even playing piano solos on the soundtrack, Rice is in over his head.
    • 32 Metascore
    • 30 Mark Olsen
    Wrong Turn
    The film does, in the end, raise something of an existential dilemma: If you set out to make a new version of something you know to be bad, and you make something that is in fact bad, have you somehow succeeded?
    • 30 Metascore
    • 30 Mark Olsen
    Daltry Calhoun
    Traub does her plucky best, coming off as part Judy Blume heroine, part post-WB hipster, and she provides the film with its few and infrequent moments of emotional truth.
    • 29 Metascore
    • 30 Mark Olsen
    Snow Dogs
    Relies almost exclusively on the gushing exuberance of Gooding Jr., and the aw-shucks factor of his digitally expressive, face-licking canine co-stars, leaving such potentially game actors as James Coburn and M. Emmet Walsh out in the cold.
    • 28 Metascore
    • 30 Mark Olsen
    47 Ronin
    Rinsch, making his feature debut, shows the shortcoming of someone coming from the image-based world of commercials and advertising. There are moments of genuine beauty and a few terrifically eye-popping effects, but no feel yet for storytelling.
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