Kids of today likely won’t have heard of the visually-impaired cartoon millionaire known as Mr. Magoo. But for a large part of the 20th Century he was a pop culture fixture who entertained generations of kids with his slapstick shenanigans. By 1997, however, his appeal had waned, which makes Disney’s decision to reboot the IP with a Leslie Nielsen-led live-action film all the more confounding. Thankfully, Roger Ebert was on-hand to let the studio have it — which he dutifully did with a scathing review that, bizarrely enough, actually awarded the film half a star.
The critic handed out some damning reviews in his time. Ebert hated Leonard Nimoy’s box office flop “Funny About Love” and even walked out of the Oscar-winning war movie “Mediterraneo.” All of which left filmmakers terrified of being handed the dreaded “thumbs down” for their efforts. Around 60 movies earned this mark of shame during the critic’s career but somehow, “Mr. Magoo” managed to eke out half a star. If you read Ebert’s thoughts on the film you’ll no doubt wonder how it managed such a feat.
In his review, Ebert revealed that the only thing he liked about the film was the titular character’s red Studebaker — that was it. Otherwise, he considered “Mr. Magoo” to be so bad it “soars above ordinary badness as the eagle outreaches the fly.” How, then, did this ill-advised comedy reboot manage to get a half-star out of the old boy? Did that Studebaker really save “Mr. Magoo” from the thumbs down club? It’s hard to imagine given just how much Ebert hated this movie.
Mr. Magoo was a misguided mid-’90s reboot attempt
There are plenty of movies Roger Ebert hated that are worth watching, but “Mr. Magoo” isn’t one of them. The character first appeared in the 1949 theatrical short “The Ragtime Bear,” where he was voiced by none other than future “Gilligan’s Island” star and legendary character actor Jim Backus. Backus voiced the United Productions of America (UPA) character until 1977, portraying him in theatrical cartoons, TV series, and TV specials. While Mr. Magoo’s character developed over the course of his existence, he’s best known as a lovably oblivious old millionaire, whose extreme nearsightedness sees him wander into dangerous situations only to miraculously escape unharmed — causing significant distress to his nephew and frequent sidekick Waldo.
While Backus stopped voicing the character after the 1977 TV series “What’s New, Mr. Magoo?” the visually-impaired millionaire endured. The most recent incarnation of the character appeared in the “Mr. Magoo” cartoon, which wrapped up in 2023. Prior to that, however, Disney decided that kids of the mid-’90s needed to be reintroduced to Quincy Magoo, and hired Hong Kong filmmaker Stanley Tong to make it happen.
In what turned out to be Tong’s one and only English-language film, the frequent Jackie Chan collaborator teamed up not with a martial arts legend but with Leslie Nielsen. The “Naked Gun” star played the eponymous millionaire in a film that saw him hunted by the FBI and criminals eager to recover a priceless gem to which Mr. Magoo is entirely oblivious. Much of the movie follows the tried-and-true formula of its title character getting himself into absurd situations and coming out unscathed, such as when he commandeers an ironing board to ski after thieves. The movie made $28.9 million on a $30 million budget and upset Roger Ebert considerably.
Roger Ebert even hated the Mr. Magoo bloopers
In his half-star review of “Mr. Magoo,” Roger Ebert described the film as being “transcendently bad,” and accused it of being entirely without laughs. The critic admitted to never having been a fan of the original cartoons, which he recalled as essentially telling the same joke over and over. Likewise, the film was, in Ebert’s estimation, “a one-joke movie without the joke.”
Interestingly enough, this might be the only time he ever took aim at the bloopers, which play during the film’s credits and evidently failed to amuse the critic. “Even the outtakes at the end aren’t funny,” he wrote, “and I’m not sure I understood one of them, unless it was meant to show stunt people hilariously almost being drowned.” Ebert wasn’t even impressed with Leslie Nielsen, who’d long since established himself as a comedic force but was, according to the reviewer, “unable to overcome the fact that a little Magoo at six minutes in a cartoon is a far different matter than a lot of Magoo at 90 minutes in a feature.”
On “Siskel & Ebert,” neither of the hosts could bring themselves to say anything nice about the movie. Gene Siskel called it “uninspired” before Ebert took the opportunity to once again lay into the movie, calling it a “wet blanket.” Roger Ebert was wrong about a fair few movies in his time, but a 10% critic score on Rotten Tomatoes suggests he was right on the money with this one. And yet, he gave the movie half a star. Why? Did the Studebaker really save it from the shame of a thumbs down rating?