As bad as you will see this or any other year

Rating: 1/10 (26 February 2015)

If you like your emperors buck naked, this turgid, fraudulent piece of dreck should be right up your alley. Black comedy? Then how come there's not so much as a chuckle, not even a wan smile, in the entire dismal mess? Art film? If this is art, true artists like Welles and Bunuel are spinning in their graves. A sheer unmitigated waste of time. I had to force myself to sit through the entire fiasco — why? Because I was determined to see it through to the end in case some brilliant scene or plot development might justify the critical praise and Academy Awards. No such luck — what you see in the first five excruciating minutes is what you get. It's like that moment in an old 70s' porno film when you realize that that pimply derrière is what you are going to be staring at for the next two hours. I actually think this is worth seeing just to prove to yourself how worthless critical reviews (and reviewers) are, and what an absolute joke the Academy Awards are. If a film has a gamy whiff of artistic pretension, these self-appointed arbiters of cinematic taste are terrified of panning it. In actual fact, they have no idea if it's art or total crap, but they don't want to appear ignorant. Well folks, rest assured, this one if total crap. As other reviewers have pointed out here, in addition to everything else, the film is a colossal waste of some very talented actors, Michael Keaton not the least of them. I am a huge Keaton fan and have been since Night Shift, but even a brilliant actor like Keaton could not save this deplorable piffle. Señor Alejandro González Iñárritu, you, sir, are an absolute fraud.