Ice Cube’s latest movie is not off to a great start, debuting on Rotten Tomatoes with 0% based on reviews from 16 critics (and counting) and just 15% aggregated from 1,000+ reviews by moviegoers. Which means it’s well on its way to potentially being regarded as one of the worst movie of all time!
The movie is an adaption of H. G. Wells’ classic 1898 novel The War of the Worlds, and also stars Eva Longoria. Cube plays Will Radford, a surveillance expert at the Department of Homeland Security who has to deal with an alien invasion while trying to keep his family out of harm’s way. Sounds silly, sure, but you could at least make a watchable, lighthearted comedy out of that premise, right?
Well, apparently not.
One review from Variety‘s Peter Debruge blasts the film for doubling as an advert for Amazon, writing, “Even with a Prime subscription, you have to sit through two minutes of ads to watch 90 more of what amounts to a feature-length commercial for all things Amazon.” At the end of the movie (spoiler alert), an Amazon delivery drone is piloted all the way across town, while being shot at by tripods, all the way to Ice Cube to save the day.
At one point, the drone gets flipped over and Ice Cube needs a homeless guy to help him out. The only thing that ends up convincing the homeless guy to risk his life and run into the tripod’s line of fire is an $1,000 Amazon gift card. I wish I was making that up…
There’s also blatant ad placement for Microsoft Teams and Tesla throughout the movie.
Meanwhile, The Telegraph‘s Ed Power took aim at Ice Cube’s acting chops: “It is silly, shoddy and features far too much of rapper-turned-leading man Ice Cube staring at a computer screen while looking as if he’s working through a reasonably urgent digestive ailment.”
Sounds awful, to be fair. On the bright side, maybe it will fall into the ‘so bad it’s good’ category, and become a cult classic over time? It’s possible, though the idea of the blatant ad placements for Amazon, Microsoft and Tesla are more off-putting than any subpar writing/plot/acting could ever be.
It’s doing even worse than Madame Web, which debuted on Rotten Tomatoes with 17%. That takes some doing…
