(Credits: Far Out / YouTube Still)
Wed 17 December 2025 18:45, UK
All art is subjective, and as it applies to cinema, comedy might be the most subjective genre of all. There’s no formula for having audiences uniformly rolling in the aisles with laughter, and one so-called comic caper left Roger Ebert so stony-faced that he didn’t even bother giving it a star rating.
It became increasingly clear that the easiest way for a comedy flick to earn a scathing review from the noted critic was to focus its humour on the more puerile, disgusting, and depraved end of the spectrum. He wasn’t a miserable bugger who couldn’t be brought to tears with laughter; he just preferred it if there was some wit about the jokes, as opposed to gross-out gags designed to shock and appal.
Terminal illness doesn’t sound like the basis for a laugh-a-minute riot, but there are a couple of films that have used a tragic situation as the backdrop for a combination of pathos and guffaws. Rob Reiner’s The Bucket List, Jonathan Levine’s 50/50, Judd Apatow’s Funny People, and Me and Earl and the Dying Girl have their moments, so it’s not impossible.
Of course, it’s all dependent on the script, the actors, and the performances, which Ebert found to be in woefully short supply when he wrapped his eyeballs around director Neal Israel’s 1992 effort, Breaking the Rules. In fact, he didn’t waste any time in razing the entire concept to the ground, which set the tone for a complete thumbs-down.
“Breaking the Rules is a movie about a guy who finds out he has a month to live, and decides to spend it in the worst buddy movie ever made,” he wrote. “The movie has to be seen to be believed. It is a long, painful lapse of taste, tone, and ordinary human feeling.”
A fresh-faced Jason Bateman stars as Phil, who hoodwinks his two best friends into going on a road trip to help him fulfil his dying wish of appearing as a contestant on the game show, Jeopardy! Naturally, hijinks ensue, bonds are stretched to the limit, and the group experiences plenty of woman trouble of both a positive and negative variety.
The plot wasn’t revelatory or ground-breaking by any stretch, but the movie turned out so terribly that Ebert wondered aloud if that’s because it hadn’t been made by humans. “Perhaps it was made by beings from another planet,” he mused. “Who were able to watch our television in order to absorb key concepts such as cars, sex, leukaemia, and casinos, but formed an imperfect view of how to fit them together.”
He may have had a point, since the critic was left wondering how on earth Breaking the Rules failed to use its central conceit to generate so much as one desired emotion. Calling it “the kind of movie where a scene is intended to make you cry, but you’re not crying, you’re wondering just how bad the dialogue can possibly be,” put his point across fairly succinctly.
Nobody would have been more thrilled than Ebert to see the picture crash, burn, and burst into flames at the box office, where it barely recouped 10% of its budget, which at least spared audiences the ignominy of having to see it for themselves.
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