Growing desperate for movies to watch in quarantine? You should still remain far away from Disney's Artemis Fowl this weekend, according to critics.
Reviews for the long-awaited film adaptation of the popular book dropped on Thursday ahead of its Disney+ debut, and critics seemed mostly in agreement that Artemis Fowl is a total bust, with the movie currently holding a shockingly low Rotten Tomatoes score of just 13 percent.
Slashfilm gave the film a devastating 1 out of 10 score, calling it a "profoundly joyless exercise" that "completely misunderstands the appeal of the original books" and diverges heavily from them. Collider, meanwhile, slapped it with an F, calling it a "chore" and "one of the dullest adventure movies in recent memory," and ScreenCrush described it as a "complete disaster" that attempts to cram in far too much plot into its 90-minute runtime. Yet despite the brief length, Variety says the "downright awful" movie still feels "tortuously long," and Uproxx says it disproves the idea that "any new movie is nice" to have right now.
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The New York Times also writes that the film "projects absolutely nothing beyond a desire to kick-start a new hotshot franchise," a franchise that now appears quite unlikely to go forward. A few critics had kinder things to say, with the Chicago Sun-Times' Richard Roeper calling it a "warm and funny and entertaining at-home family viewing experience." But based on Rotten Tomatoes, these reviewers were certainly in the minority.
Artemis Fowl, which is directed by Kenneth Branagh, was previously set to hit theaters last month, but after theaters shuttered, it got a release directly on Disney+ instead. Disney has had live-action box office flops before like The Nutcracker and the Four Realms, and it seems Artemis Fowl heading to streaming may have helped it just barely avoid that grim fate.
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