The Guardian has issued an embarrassing correction to inform readers that the score it gave for the Melania documentary was even lower than originally reported.
The left-leaning British outlet had initially awarded the $75 million film about the first lady an already dire one star out of five.
However, in a February 2 correction posted on its website, The Guardian said the one-star rating was printed due to a “formatting issue,” when reviewer Xan Brooks had in fact intended to give the film a grand total of zero stars.
The correction means the film—which follows President Donald Trump’s wife during the 20 days leading up to his inauguration last January—is just the 19th to receive a zero-star review in The Guardian’s more than 200-year history. The most recent to earn the brutal assessment was Kim Kardashian’s widely panned legal drama All’s Fair.
The film, which bombed even harder in the U.K. than it did in the U.S., premiered worldwide on Jan. 30 to lackluster reviews and even worse audience buzz.
Brooks’ revised zero-star review pulls no punches, calling Melania Trump’s big-budget vanity project 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,” Brooks wrote.
“It’s dispiriting, it’s deadly, and it’s spectacularly unrevealing. Ratner’s film plays like a gilded trash remake of Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest in which a button-eyed Cinderella points at gold baubles and designer dresses, cunningly distracting us while her husband and his cronies prepare to dismantle the Constitution and asset-strip the federal government.”
The Guardian was not the only outlet to pan the documentary. A review from the Daily Beast—which, mercifully for Melania, does not use a star-rating system—also dismissed the film as an “abomination.”
“Of course, everyone knew the film, directed for an obscene amount of money by notorious sex pest Brett Ratner, was going to be bad. It’s the specific kind of bad I was on a fact-finding mission for,” wrote Kevin Fallon, editor-at-large at the Daily Beast’s Obsessed. “Melania is a level of insipid propaganda that almost resists review; it’s so expected and utterly pointless.”
The film is estimated to have grossed around $7 million at the box office over the weekend, meaning it will not recoup anywhere near its mammoth $75 million budget.
