Roger Ebert gave Speed 2: Cruise Control three stars. It won the Razzie for Worst Picture.
The Original Review
“Speed 2: Cruise Control is great-looking, professionally made and fun to watch.”
The math ain't mathing, and I've been doing math so long my calculator filed for emancipation. Let's run the numbers on Roger Ebert's three-star verdict on Speed 2: Cruise Control. Three out of four. That's 75%. The Rotten Tomatoes critical consensus has the film at 4%. That is a 71-point delta between Ebert and the entire rest of the critical world. That isn't a difference of opinion. That's living on a different planet, in a different solar system, governed by different laws of cinema physics.
Speed 2 won the Razzie Award for Worst Picture in 1998. Not nominated for. Won. The film actively defeated five other contenders in a competition specifically designed to identify the worst movie of the year, and Roger Ebert apparently watched a different cut. While the rest of the planet sat through a cruise ship slowly bumping into a small Caribbean village at the dramatic pace of a parking lot incident, Ebert was over here calling it 'fun to watch.' Sir, the boat is going three knots. That's not kinetic. That's a particularly determined manatee.
Let me run the historical regression on the Ebert review database. He gave Knowing four stars. He gave Anaconda three stars. He gave The Mummy Returns three stars. There is a statistical phenomenon in his data I call sliding-scale forgiveness syndrome — the personal enjoyment coefficient becomes mathematically decoupled from the quality coefficient somewhere around the second handful of popcorn. The numbers don't lie. Ebert was a critic who enjoyed enjoying things, which is a wonderful trait in a dinner guest and an absolutely catastrophic methodology for a star rating.
The variance check: every other major critic landed between zero and one star. Ebert landed at three. That is a four-sigma event in critical consensus terms. Statistically, his review of Speed 2 is rarer than the film actually being good. We give this review a 2/10, which on the Ebert curve probably converts to four stars and a thumbs up.
