The Worst Kevin Costner Film, In accordance To Rotten Tomatoes

In case you grew up on such movies as “Ace Ventura: Pet Detective,” “The Nutty Professor,” and “Liar Liar,” you probably know the title Tom Shadyac. The author/director made a reputation for himself with these now beloved household comedies. You would possibly bear in mind his first detour from such fare with the critically-panned however commercially profitable “Patch Adams,” however likelihood is you’ve got by no means heard of his follow-up.

Shadyac’s 2002 supernatural thriller “Dragonfly” was each bit as maudlin as “Patch Adams” but it surely additionally had the excellence of being a bona fide field workplace dud, making $52 million on a $60 million funds. Making an attempt one thing completely different is usually to be recommended, however the man who directed “Ace Ventura” helming a movie a couple of widowed physician whose useless spouse contacts him by means of sufferers does not seem to be essentially the most well-advised profession transfer. Nonetheless, in the event you’ve acquired Kevin Costner fronting your weird drama, you could be in with an opportunity of constructing one thing half-decent. 

By 2002, Costner was at a wierd place career-wise, coming off the critically-panned however commercially profitable “Message in a Bottle” in 1999 and the well-received however commercially disappointing “13 Days” in 2000. However there isn’t any doubt he was a longtime star by that time, having already gained his Oscars for “Dances with Wolves” a decade prior and fronting “Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves,” “The Bodyguard,” and “Waterworld” within the interim — a few of Kevin Costner’s greatest films.

Sadly, even a star of his magnitude could not save Shadyac’s ill-advised 2002 movie, which at the moment stands as Costner’s lowest-rated film on Rotten Tomatoes .

In “Dragonfly,” Kevin Costner performs Joe Darrow, a health care provider at a Chicago hospital the place his spouse, Dr. Emily Darrow (Susanna Thompson) additionally works. After Emily dies on a visit to Venezuela to assist Amazonian natives, Joe has a sequence of unusual experiences: sufferers inform him they noticed visions of Emily, lightbulbs escape of nowhere, and Joe hears his spouse’s voice coming by means of sufferers which might be clinically useless. All of it appears to be telling him one thing about his late spouse, so he ultimately travels to Venezuela the place he finds out the reality in a finale that’s alleged to be transferring however, as TimeOut put it in a evaluation, finally ends up being “predictable as it’s a very long time coming.”

That is truly one of many nicer issues critics stated about “Dragonfly,” which on the time of writing, has a 7% score on Rotten Tomatoes. Of the 125 opinions collected on the location, 36 come from Prime Critics, and solely a kind of opinions is optimistic. Whereas Selection’s Joe Leydon discovered the movie to be a “fitfully affecting story of affection past demise and religion past cause,” he was apparently the one one. In a far much less charitable evaluation, the Chicago Reader‘s Jonathan Rosenbaum wrote, “The undisputed king of the cornball idea, Kevin Costner has an uncanny aptitude for gravitating towards the dopiest initiatives in sight, however this time he is outdone himself.” Jonathan Foreman of the New York Put up, in the meantime, put it rather more tersely, calling the film, “Sappy, mechanical tripe.”

Elsewhere, A. O. Scott of the New York Occasions quipped he felt “powerfully drawn towards the sunshine — the sunshine of the exit signal,” whereas the LA Occasions’ Kevin Thomas concluded that it was “inconceivable to seek out the movie something however appalling, shamelessly manipulative and contrived, and completely missing in conviction.” Past that 7% score, then, all that crucial opprobrium provides as much as a 3.8 out of 10 common score and a crucial consensus that reads, “Sappy, boring, and muddled, ‘Dragonfly’ is just too melancholic and cliched to generate a lot suspense.”

Again in 1997, Kevin Costner directed and starred in “The Postman,” a post-apocalyptic drama that noticed the actor play the titular nomad who evokes hope in a small settler group after discovering the uniform of a postman and utilizing it to faux america authorities has been re-established in Minneapolis. If that seems like a “Dragonfly”-level catastrophe, it nearly was.

“The Postman” was a colossal field workplace flop that nearly ended Costner’s profession, and at the moment has a 14% score on Rotten Tomatoes, with a median score of simply 3.2 out of 10. You would possibly suppose would make it the actor’s lowest-rated movie ever. However so far as Rotten Tomatoes goes, “The Postman” is Costner’s second lowest-rated, with “Dragonfly” managing to edge out his self-directed blunder. That ought to let you know simply how dangerous Tom Shadyac’s film actually is.

In the meantime Costner is coping with the field workplace failure of his ardour venture, “Horizon: An American Saga — Chapter 1,” which fortunately no less than discovered success on VOD, and fared higher than “Dragonfly” critically, with a 51% score on Rotten Tomatoes.