First and foremost, Regal Cinemas left money on the table not making its signature Melania popcorn bucket in the shape of her big stupid inauguration hat. If you’re participating in political farce, you may as well lean in. Everything about the rollout of this documentary “creative experience that offers perspectives, insights, and moments” has been strange, from the buckets to the critical reviews. The Guardian called it “a gilded trash remake of The Zone of Interest” in the headline. The body of the review actually got meaner. Variety called it a “cheeseball infomercial,” and Decider used the film to retroactively slam other Brett Ratner projects, calling Red Dragon “about as bad as a movie one could possibly make with Anthony Hopkins playing Hannibal Lecter backed by an all-star cast.”
But do these horrendous reviews correspond with piss-poor box office, or are the people rallying around FLOTUS? They are not. The National Research Group estimates that Melania will make $5 million at the box office against the $40 million Amazon paid for it. But what’s a few million dollars between pals?
“No doubt there is a great documentary to be made about Melania Knauss, the ambitious model from out of Slovenia who married a New York real-estate mogul and then found herself cast in the role of a latter-day Eva Braun, but the horrific Melania emphatically isn’t it. It’s one of those rare, unicorn films that doesn’t have a single redeeming quality. I’m not even sure it qualifies as a documentary, exactly, so much as an elaborate piece of designer taxidermy, horribly overpriced and ice-cold to the touch and proffered like a medieval tribute to placate the greedy king on his throne.”
— Xan Brooks, The Guardian
“To say that Melania is a hagiography would be an insult to hagiographies. This is a film that fawns so lavishly over its subject that you feel downright unpatriotic not gushing over it. Fittingly, it was directed by Brett Ratner, whose feature film career was derailed in 2017 after numerous sexual assault allegations that he has denied. But like many unsavory people associated with Donald Trump, he’s apparently received a pardon.” — Frank Scheck, The Hollywood Reporter
“It is galling to think about Jeff Bezos (whose wife is a former TV news anchor) deciding to invest so much money apparently to buy the president’s good graces while reportedly preparing to cut hundreds of jobs at The Washington Post. (Amazon reps have insisted that the company invested so heavily in the movie purely “because we think customers are going to love it.”) It is also galling — to me at least — that Apple CEO Tim Cook attended the premiere of Melania this week while the Trump administration’s militarized forces are killing Americans and detaining preschoolers.” — Sophie Gilbert, The Atlantic
“Kicking off your movie with a one-two punch of needle-dropping ‘Gimme Shelter’ by the Rolling Stones and ‘Billie Jean’ by Michael Jackson means you’re probably one of three things: Martin Scorsese, Baz Luhrmann, or an idiot. Brett Ratner, accused sex pest and filmmaker behind the Rush Hour trilogy, is not either of the first two.” — Jesse Hassenger, Decider
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“Melania is a documentary that never comes to life. It’s a ‘portrait’ of the First Lady of the United States, but it’s so orchestrated and airbrushed and stage-managed that it barely rises to the level of a shameless infomercial. Is it cheesy? At moments, but mostly it’s inert. It feels like it’s been stitched together out of the most innocuous outtakes from a reality show. There’s no drama to it. It should have been called ‘Day of the Living Tradwife.’”
— Owen Gleiberman, Variety
“Melania is the worst movie I’ve ever seen.” — Natasha Jokic, Buzzfeed
