![\"Roger](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/Roger-Ebert-Film-Critic-1990s-Far-Out-Magazine-1140x855.jpg\")
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(Credits: Far Out \/ YouTube Still)<\/p>\n
Mon 2 February 2026 17:15, UK <\/p>\n
Some movies start strong before losing momentum, others kick off with a bang and peak before the opening credits, certain films open on a weaker footing before eventually finding themselves, and then there are the unlucky films that begin terribly and get worse with each passing minute, with Roger Ebert<\/a> having the misfortune of having to sit through one of the latter examples.<\/p>\n In an ideal world, a picture will maintain a level of quality from its first to last minutes, but that\u2019s rarely the case. History is littered with terrible flicks that have at least one, if not more<\/a>, incredible scenes, while there are also the unfortunate features that blow their wad too early before failing to hold the audience\u2019s attention.<\/p>\n No filmmaker wants to find themselves responsible for something that sucks from the opening frame and continues to slide downward into disaster, but Alex Cox managed it with 1987\u2019s Walker, at least according to Ebert. It stung more because Repo Man and Sid & Nancy had established him as a talented auteur, and maybe it\u2019s telling that his fourth feature was the first one he hadn\u2019t written himself.<\/p>\n The story had plenty of potential, too, with Ed Harris cast in the title role of William Walker, who mounted an unauthorised invasion of Nicaragua and declared himself the nation\u2019s president. To make a weird true-life tale even weirder, Cox intentionally loaded the movie with anachronistic details. It was a polarising period piece, but there was no debate over which side of the fence Ebert landed on.<\/p>\n \u201cSome bad movies are in no hurry to announce themselves,\u201d he opened a zero-star review<\/a>. \u201cBut Walker declares its badness right from the opening titles with gushers of blood streaming from the wounds of men who are appearing (the opening credits promise us) in a \u2018true story.’\u201d<\/p>\n Calling a movie a travesty once is bad enough, but doing it twice in quick succession underlines how much Ebert loathed Walker, which never recovered from its shaky introductory scenes and continued to offend the critic by wasting good actors and an intriguing premise on a big-screen abomination.<\/p>\n As far as he was concerned, Harris was \u201cdone in by the script, the direction, and certainly by the agent who negotiated his presence in this travesty.\u201d Meanwhile, he felt much the same about Marlee Martin, in what was her first onscreen credit since she\u2019d won the Academy Award for \u2018Best Actress\u2019 in Children of a Lesser God.<\/p>\n Ebert noted that she\u2019d followed up her \u201ctriumph\u201d with \u201ca role that is a demeaning travesty,\u201d in which she\u2019s bumped off by the end of the first act. As a result, Harris is left \u201cvirtually alone to negotiate a pointless and increasingly obnoxious exercise in satire,\u201d or at least that\u2019s what he thinks Cox was going for.<\/p>\n He wasn\u2019t sure, though, since he also pointed out that \u201cthis movie is apparently intended as a comedy or a satire,\u201d a descriptor he didn\u2019t understand since \u201cit has no laughs.\u201d Walker has its fans, albeit only among those who can get on Cox\u2019s extremely specific wavelength<\/a>, but it\u2019s an understatement to say that Ebert wasn\u2019t one of them.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n Related Topics<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"(Credits: Far Out \/ YouTube Still) Mon 2 February 2026 17:15, UK Some movies start strong before losing…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":405033,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[125326,96,2839,38263,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-405032","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-movies","8":"tag-ed-harris","9":"tag-entertainment","10":"tag-movies","11":"tag-roger-ebert","12":"tag-uk","13":"tag-united-kingdom","14":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/405032","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=405032"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/405032\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/405033"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=405032"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=405032"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=405032"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}