Russell Crowe’s New Mystery Thriller’s Rotten Tomatoes Debut Continues Disappointing Trend

Summary

• Russell Crowe’s latest film,
  Sleeping Dogs
  , has a disappointing 29% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, continuing a trend of low scores for the star.
• Despite a previous moderate success with
  Land of Bad
  , Crowe’s recent films have struggled to impress critics, with a downward trend in ratings.
• Crowe’s upcoming projects, like
  Kraven the Hunter
  and
  The Georgetown Project
  , may offer a chance for the star to regain favor with critics.

Russell Crowe’s new mystery thriller Sleeping Dogs has a Rotten Tomatoes rating, and it continues a disappointing trend for the star. Co-starring Karen Gillan, Crowe’s newest film casts the Gladiator actor as an Alzheimer’s-stricken former homicide detective, who must revisit an old case when a mysterious woman provides new information. The movie’s release comes fast on the heels of Land of Bad, the Crowe-led action film that dropped in February, which scored passingly well with critics, as reflected in its 63% fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes.

Crowe’s last film may indeed have edged into fresh territory on the internet’s biggest review aggregator, but his newest has reasserted a generally disappointing trend for the star, as Sleeping Dogs arrives with a very low 29% fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes. That rating is based on just 21 reviews, so there’s still a chance things could edge upward as more critics weigh in.

Where Sleeping Dogs Ranks Among Crowe’s Recent Movies

Land of Bad’s 63% fresh rating notwithstanding, Crowe’s recent Rotten Tomatoes scores have been disappointing. The star’s last big RT hit, in which he was definitively one of the leads, was 2016’s The Nice Guys, scoring 91% fresh. The downward slide began with 2020’s Unhinged, and continued through Prizefighter: The Life of Jem Belcher, The Greatest Beer Run Ever, Poker Face and The Pope’s Exorcist.

Poker Face marks the RT low point for Crowe’s recent output, scoring just 9% fresh. Sleeping Dogs’ 29% fresh rating makes it look like a masterpiece compared to that forgotten 2022 film, which Crowe also wrote and directed, but ranks it below mediocrities like The Pope’s Exorcist and The Greatest Beer Run Ever.

Reversing this disappointing Rotten Tomatoes trend may be difficult for Crowe, as his next movie up after Sleeping Dogs is Kraven the Hunter, the Sony’s Spider-Man Universe follow-up to the widely-ridiculed flop Madame Web. Crowe may have a better chance to get back in critics’ good graces with his upcoming horror movie The Georgetown Project, or his pending prestige drama Nuremberg, in which he plays notorious Nazi Hermann Göring.

Source: Rotten Tomatoes