Slate discusses the idea of “critic-proof films” while going after the absolute worst ’successful’ films of 2009.

They have an odd idea of critic-proof. For my money, the Night at the Museum sequel was (while not as good as the first) precisely what it advertised: a weird, wild romp through all sorts of odd stuff set in the Smithsonian. I would probably have given it about a 70% rating or so.

The next down on their list has to be GI Joe. This one smacks of “potential.” They had a decent premise to start an action movie, screwed up one part by making them an “International” force rather than “Real American Heroes”, and screwed up a second time in plot direction. The rash of odd things appearing in the movie looked like someone sat down in front of their old toy box and started pulling out random toys to toss into the movie. Aerotech fighter plane (complete with PPC weaponry)? Check. Halo-ish power armor? Check. Some weird submarine thing? Check. Big crazy plane that looks vaguely like a Blackbird (which were produced for any number of toy lines, including the old GI Joe)? Check. I kept looking around half expecting to see the Sandcrawler, er “GI Joe Mobile Command Center“, somewhere in the film. What was really jarring, however, was the fact that great actors (Brendan Frasier got a mere cameo and the line “yeah, they’re Joes”: he should have been STARRING, it would have made a hilarious movie) got passed up, lame/wooden actors got lead parts, and the storyline scenes were ripped wholesale, storyboard and all right from other movies (up to, and including, a scene near the end of the movie where two ninjas fight each other in the middle of a cylindrical generator with lightning sparking all around, and the Black Ninja pulls a second sword and sticks the two hilts together to form a Darth Maul-ish double bladed sword… oh BTW, Ray Park, who played Darth Maul except for getting his voice dubbed over, is the White Ninja).

As for Couples Retreat and Paul Blart… I stayed away. Wisely, from what I have heard out of people who did go. And of course their “maybe, could be” list also includes the incoherent, bizarre X-Men Origins: Wolverine, the vaguely anti-catholic and just plain pathetic Angels and Demons, and the second installment in the spawn-of-buffy (thank you, Joss Whedon, for permanently making vampires lame) “homoerotic, sparkling vampires and the lame whiny schoolgirls who pine after them” Twilight series.

And what starts off Slate’s article? Why, they’re talking about the sequel to 2007’s Alvin & The Chipmunks, a CGI monstrosity the likes of which normally kill franchises, and the inevitable followup to the fact that the previous CGI-ified series to make the plunge was Garfield, which has a few decades of nonstop goodwill, nostalgia and familiarity and can recover from viewers’ feelings of betrayal simply by popping up the next morning unchanged in the newspaper.

Slate’s underlying premise is that there are films that the critics will hate (or at least “not like enough”) while still being popular. For example, the first Star Wars got passed over by the Academy, while this piece of almost-incoherent, highly depressive dreck got four to prove that critics love it when films get all dark and needlessly emo with a side order of neurosis. While I cannot disagree with the premise, I think it proves itself in their article. Of the list they provide, I can find at least one that I got some enjoyment out of, and one that has serious potential for becoming a cult classic (I can see, ~5 years from now, organized parties in which we shout the original lines for whatever scene is being wholesale ripped off, or some other inane comments, when rewatching GI Joe: The Rise Of Cobra. “Great shot kid, that was one in a million” comes to mind for some reason I can’t seem to explain…).