Veteran actor Samuel L. Jackson must be accustomed to negative movie reviews.
“Snakes on a Plane” wasn’t exactly Oscar-worthy.
Yet Jackson fired off an angry tweet about New York Times’ movie critic A.O. Scott for the latter’s mildly negative review of “The Avenger” – opening tomorrow.
Get a new job, one you can actually do, Jackson fumed.
Movie stars big and small need thick skins about their craft. Movie critics criticize, and movie stars pick up obscenely large checks for playing pretend. The system usually works sans hitch.
And while it’s easy to side with Scott on this issue, his review must be read to be believed. Here are a few choice snippets:
The secret of “The Avengers” is that it is a snappy little dialogue comedy dressed up as something else, that something else being a giant A.T.M. for Marvel and its new studio overlords, the Walt Disney Company….
Mr. Whedon’s playful, democratic pop sensibility is no match for the glowering authoritarianism that now defines Hollywood’s comic-book universe….
But for all their maverick swagger, the Avengers are dutiful corporate citizens, serving a conveniently vague set of principles. Are they serving private interests, big government, their own vanity, or what? It hardly matters, because the true guiding spirit of their movie is Loki, who promises to set the human race free from freedom and who can be counted on for a big show wherever he goes. In Germany he compels a crowd to kneel before him in mute, terrified awe, and “The Avengers,” which recently opened there to huge box office returns, expects a similarly submissive audience here at home. The price of entertainment is obedience.
Wow. Jackson deserves a pass here. The New York Times‘ review deserves a Nick Fury-styled smackdown.
Scott will surely survive Jackson’s cyber-taunt. It might even give him some street cred within the film critic community. But Scott can expect an avalanche of angry email and comments from “Avengers” fans for days to come. Comic book geeks do not take negative reviews lightly.