The filmmaker's job is to make films. The film critic's job is to tell the filmmaker what the results were. It's got nothing whatever to do with "if can't do, criticise." A filmmaker can be so invested in their project that they will not see its flaws. A film critic's job is to be completely outside of that investment and look at the project as a whole.
Writers have the same feelings about those who review their stories. They also have a deep seated hatred of editors. Why? Because editors are usually not writers themselves, and so the writers think, "they're not writers; they don't know how I've sweated over this masterpiece of prose; they know nothing because they've never written a word themselves." In fact, the worst editors are those who are writers themselves or worse, want to be writers. They are simply too invested in their own writing to be able to be objective about anyone else's.
A good editor knows what makes a good story, and he doesn't have to be a writer himself. All he has to know about is writing; what constitutes a good story, how that story is told, what he thinks his readers will enjoy. The editor's job is also to tell the writer what needs to be fixed in his story, whether it needs to be longer or shorter, whether the plot needs to be tweaked, if the language is inadequate or over the top.
That's why there are writers and there are editors. They are two different jobs, and one cannot exist without the other. (Example: there's a lot of self-published work on the internet at the moment. "Awful" only begins to describe the majority of it, and it goes downhill from there.)
Ditto with filmmakers and film critics. Why do you suppose there are no filmmakers as film critics? Not one, anywhere? Because they know they could NOT review a film, because they are too invested subjectively in the process. They cannot stand back and look at a film as a whole because they know the process, and for them the result has to be perfect; they cannot accept anything else. The film critic's job is to be objective. Sorry; the LEGITIMATE film critic's job is to be objective, and to assess the final result, without the baggage of all the sweat and tears that went into the making of it. It's not the making of a film that makes the film; it's the result. And if the result is not good, it's the film critic's job to say so without fear of repercussion.
An actor usually has no idea if their performance was a good one or not - until they read the review. When they are in the moment, they are just doing their job. They have no idea what the result is going to be like until they see the film. That's the job of the film critic - to tell the actor how he did, to tell the director if he did a good job with the actor, with the story he's supposed to be telling.
That's why I provided the examples above. One is a legitimate film critic who has been involved in studying films for a very long time. He knows his stuff, inside and out. The other example was someone who was simply assigned to write a review and doesn't know the first thing about filmmaking or the genre of action movies, and applied his own taste and preferences to the review instead of reviewing the film on its own merits.
The latter example is indicative of many of the reviews we see that engage in Steven-bashing, because the writer in question focused on his own prejudices. Ditto the majority of the reviews that I've come across on the internet. (In fact, some months ago I proposed to write an essay on the subject, and with this topic, it kind of sneaked up on me, so I guess this is the essay!) The focus of the review is not on the movie as a whole but on the soi-disant critic's prejudices. These particular reviews have more to do with the individual writing them wanting to share his knife-sharp wit with the world at large, and less to do with actually assessing the movie on its own merits.
In my book, they are not legitimate film critics, and so anything they write is spurious and to be ignored. These are the people that give legitimate film criticism a bad name. Tarring all film critics with their soiled brush is a mistake, one that's easily made, I grant you, because there's comfort in generalisation, and one isn't required, therefore, to engage in any critical thought of one's own. The difficulty, of course, is the effort to recognise that there is a distinction between wannabe fanboys writing their uninformed opinions, and a film critic whose job it is to be fair and objective, particularly when, after an objective review, the results run counter to an individual's worldview, sic: "Steven Seagal's movies are all perfect just because Steven is in them, and anybody reviewing any of his films that say otherwise is suffering from penis envy."
action hero there ever was, he's also the most socially conscious. Even though he basically got laughed at by many in Hollywood because of some of the themes of his movies (especially ODG), that doesn't mean his points have any less value. And he proved that he really cares about these issues because he kept bringing them up, even when the box office said that people weren't interested in that kind of message in their action movies.
Gotta love it.
