Sarah Palin, when asked by Katie Couric what newspapers and magazine she read, said "'all of them". So certainly the hockey mom and former Vice Presidential candidate knows of a positive review "The Undefeated" has scored, but film review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes can't. As of Monday afternoon, the bio-pic about Palin has scored a humiliate 0% among critics.
Rejection one likes it.
Even the new Kevin James movie, "The Zookeeper," a comedy co-starring chatting zoo animal, got a 13%.
"Anyone hoping for an inside look at Palin's private life will be disappointed," wrote Variety. "Political junkies eager to know more about Palin's vice presidential campaign are similarly out of luck."
"Once you grasp the film is just leaving to be a string of encomiums against a backdrop of frantically reduced archival material in which few shots are allowed to stay onscreen longer than three seconds, it's clear that no important analysis of the woman's career or political agenda will be forthcoming,"complained The Hollywood Reporter.
Here at the Times, Robert Abele also gave it a negative review.
"By the time 'The Undefeated' hits its final rallying-cry note, hinting with a hammer swing at the imagined glory of a 2012 presidential run, the patience of even die-hards might be weathered by Bannon's ain't-she-perfect fervor. All Palin has to do is make those fans happy and run. But then she'd really have to live up to that title," Abele conclude.
The New York Post's review of "The Undefeated" is missing from the 10 negative reviews for the film on Rotten Tomatoes, but it was one of the earliest and most negative -- despite being owned by Rupert Murdoch, who pays Palin to appear on Fox News.
The Post's Kyle Smith warns that it "is just a fan film from an outsider hitching a ride on [Palin's] celebrity, hoping that notice from political journalists in the early principal states of Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina will provide a springboard for a national release [of the movie]."
That critique got the critic uninvited to the after that screening of the film.
high-quality thing political blog Wonkette was not invited to any screenings. Describing the onslaught of miserable reviews, Winchester blogger Kirsten Boyd Johnson said the film opened "to exactly the amount of excitement visible on the face of attentive subway car passengers standing next to someone who has just [passed gas]."
When asked this weekend about the bad reviews, the movie's director, Stephen Bannon, told the Ticket it didn't bother him.
"The critics talk about the marginalia of what I left out while acknowledge [Palin's] great accomplishments. I will take that trade all day long," he said.
