The Interview racks up high IMDB rating even as some critics turn up their noses

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      The IMDB website currently has an 8.1 rating out of 10 for The Interview, which is practically stratospheric.

      That's been generated from 80,483 people who posted their evaluations of the controversial new comedy starring Seth Rogen and James Franco.

      Codirected by Rogen and Evan Goldberg, who were both born in Vancouver, the film depicts a plan to assassinate North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un.

      Of those who voted on the IMDB site, 63.7 percent gave The Interview a score of 10. Only 13.1 percent gave it a rating of six or lower.

      Males under 18 years old gave it the highest rating: 9.2 percent. The ratings dropped as evaluators' ages increased, with those 45 and older only giving it a 6.9 score on average.

      Meanwhile, the Rotten Tomatoes website has critics only giving The Interview an average rating of 5.8 out of 10. The so-called "Top Critics" had the film rated even lower at 5.6 out of 10, with 16 of the 26 putting it in the "rotten" category. However, the Rotten Tomatoes site currently has The Interview with an audience score of 64 percent.

      One critic with a positive take is David Edelstein of New York Magazine and Vulture.com, who called The Interview "a truly savage work".

      "It means not just to expose Kim Jong-un as a fraud but to emasculate him, which is about the most punk thing you can do to a repressive, totalitarian, murderous, self-proclaimed god of a closed but increasingly porous state," Edelstein wrote on Vulture.com.

      The divergence between audience scores and critics' scores reflects something that won't surprise many moviegoers. Sometimes the most popular films in theatres are pooh-poohed by the arbiters of what constitutes good taste who work in the media.

      Comments

      9 Comments

      Meatballs

      Dec 27, 2014 at 11:39am

      Yes yes but when do we hear about the part where Kim's head explodes?! I'm dying here!

      0 0Rating: 0

      Teehee

      Dec 27, 2014 at 3:06pm

      It is only a matter of time before we realize all states are like NK. The only question is whether you're in the Kim family or not, which is larger or smaller depending on the state.

      0 0Rating: 0

      danR

      Dec 28, 2014 at 7:21am

      The critics' average is correct. It's a funny movie. It's not a very funny movie. It's not reasonable to rate this picture higher than an industry gold standard 'The Naked Gun' or the catastrophically funny 'Team America: World Police' which Matt Damon, mercilessly piloried as Hollywood's village idiiot, considered a quantum leap in funny.

      0 0Rating: 0

      Shon Togan

      Dec 28, 2014 at 9:11am

      I still don't understand what the 45 minute mini-documentary on Gails search for inner peace and a decent cheesecake in an Indian ashram was doing in the film. You have to admit, that part was a little boring.

      0 0Rating: 0

      canali

      Dec 28, 2014 at 10:56am

      who cares about IMDB ratings....most people rely on Rotten Tomatoes, imo.

      0 0Rating: 0

      Andrew Heenan

      Dec 29, 2014 at 2:03am

      No-one ever said it was a great film; it's a teenage comedy. It is what it is. Yet the accurately described so-called "Top Critics" sneer at it, as if the political fuss should have magically made it an Orson Welles work of satiric genius. Their reviews - as usual - tell us more about their own closed world than about the Movie.

      0 0Rating: 0

      Ron Y

      Dec 29, 2014 at 1:37pm

      I thought it was kind of sloppy structurally and that Franco's performance is...polarizing...however it is damn funny (the point of a comedy, yeah?) and the brazenness, the gigantic stones of it, make the jokes land harder than they would have otherwise. Given the furour, it's kind of a Must See

      0 0Rating: 0

      Critics?

      Dec 29, 2014 at 9:28pm

      Do people still care what critics say in 2015? See the movie, maybe you'll like it, maybe you won't. Don't let some shithead tell you what to think.

      John

      Dec 30, 2014 at 11:05am

      Overall, a boring film. The only really funny scene was when Seth Rogen's finger was bitten off. I saw the film several days ago and I'm still laughing about that one scene. OMFG, STILL LMAO! He should have a body part bitten off in every film he makes, going forward.

      0 0Rating: 0