The Times' Scores

For 262 reviews, this publication has graded:
  • 41% higher than the average critic
  • 1% same as the average critic
  • 58% lower than the average critic
On average, this publication grades 1.9 points lower than other critics. (0-100 point scale)
Average Movie review score: 63
Highest review score: 100 Pride & Prejudice
Lowest review score: 0 The Super Mario Galaxy Movie
Score distribution:
  1. Negative: 21 out of 262
262 movie reviews
  1. Pratt is fine, and blandly likeable in the manner of a not-especially-demanding labrador, but the prospect of his blameless heroism is always depressingly inevitable and the identity of the real villain is conspicuous from almost the first scene.
  2. Ultimately, bar some tedious spell-making scenes, nothing happens. Harrowingly poor.
  3. It doesn’t help either that the cheap-looking CGI unicorns are wildly unconvincing or that Jenna Ortega, as Elliot’s disaffected daughter Ridley, seems to have wandered on to the set from a different and far more subtle movie.
  4. It all ends with a grossly emetic monologue about how evil mass media is trying to “make us hate each other so they can steal from us”. And The Running Man is not part of the mass media how? Still, who doesn’t love Shaun of the Dead?
  5. This is intellectually specious and ethically dubious. You can’t simply hide bad art underneath political messaging. Yes, we need movies, urgently, that fully address Epstein, Pelicot and all the male monsters of the world, and this week’s brilliant Sound of Falling, from the German female director Mascha Schilinski, arguably does that in spades. But slapping the phrase “Me too” onto a sloppy, ham-fisted vanity project doesn’t cut it.
  6. Even by the depressing standards set by the Mortal Kombat movies, Uncharted and the first two miserable Sonic the Hedgehog outings, this third Sonic is staggeringly poor.
  7. The film is torturous to sit through and, for me, provoked periods of actual physical discomfort. I had to stab myself repeatedly in the hand with a pen to distract from the howling distress. It’s that bad, and that offensive.

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