Sunday Column: Reviews by Times Critics with \'All Guns Blazing\'

Reviews With ‘All Guns Blazing'

THE Times's culture editor, Jonathan Landman, calls them “exuberant pans” - reviews so energetically negative that they seem to achieve liftoff. They blast into the media world with cosmic force. Everyone wants to talk about them in a “did you see that?” way. Sometimes, they become instant classics. And, it goes almost without saying, the critic's fun is inversely proportional to how it feels on the receiving end.

The most recent example at The Times is the now-famous skewering of the Times Square restaurant recently opened by Guy Fieri, a Food Network star. The review, by Pete Wells, took an all-question approach, beginning: “Guy Fieri, have you eaten in your new restaurant in Times Square?”

He also asked: “Were you struck by how very far from awesome the Awesome Pretzel Chicken Tenders are?” and “When we hear the words Donkey Sauce, which part of the donkey are we supposed to think about?” and “Why did the toasted marshmallow taste like fish?”

As the review was going viral, I spoke with Mr. Wells, who told me that he had set out hoping to enjoy Guy's American Kitchen & Bar. Although he knew it was not a sophisticated destination, “I would have liked to write the ‘man-bites-dog' review” - he wanted to be pleasantly surprised. Despite four visits, that was not to be. Of course, it's not just restaurants that can end up as the unlucky targets of a critic's ire. So can plays, albums, actors, art exhibits and movies.

And sometimes a critic's dismissal becomes immortal. Who can forget Dorothy Parker's judgment that Katharine Hepburn could run “the gamut of emotions from A to B,” or Pauline Kael's vaporization of the director Paul Schrader's “Hardcore”: “For Schrader to call himself a whore would be vanity; he doesn't know how to turn a trick.”

From Mr. Landman's point of view, the “all-guns-blazing takedown” shouldn't happen often. “There are a thousand ticks between the greatest and the worst,” he said, “and a great critic is unerringly accurate in picking the right place on that scale.”

Still, there are times when it is only right to wield a sharp knife. And those with the greatest verbal gifts do it memorably. Consider, for example, a 2006 review by Garrison Keillor of “American Vertigo: Traveling America in the Footsteps of Tocqueville,” by Bernard-Henri Levy, a book meant to update another Frenchman's view of the New World. Mr. Keillor took aim at the pomposity: Monsieur Levy “is a French writer with a spatter-paint prose style and the grandiosity of a college sophomore; he rambled around this country at the behest of The Atlantic Monthly and now has worked up his notes into a sort of book.”

When he was done, you could practically see him blowing the smoke from the mouth of his six-shooter before nonchalantly replacing it in its holster. Or think of Jon Pareles's demolition of the band Coldplay as it released its long-awaited “X&Y” album. I mentioned this review a few days ago to a 24-year-old journalist friend, and he surprised me by immediately reciting its key phrase verbatim. He was in high school when it was published in The Times in 2005.

Pareles began: “There's nothing wrong with self-pity. As a spur to songwriting, it's right up there with lust, anger and greed, and probably better than the remaining deadly sins. There's nothing wrong, either, with striving for musical grandeur, using every bit of skill and studio illusion to create a sound large enough to get lost in. Male sensitivity, a quality that's under siege in a pop culture full of unrepentant bullying and machismo, shouldn't be dismissed out of hand, no matter how risible it can be in practice. And building a sound on the lessons of past bands is virtually unavoidable.”

And only then does he deliver the solar-plexus punch: “But put them all together and they add up to Coldplay, the most insufferable band of the decade.”

Or recall two theater reviews last year, both by Ben Brantley, of “Spiderman: Turn Off the Dark” - one while the troubled show was in its endless previews, the second after it was supposedly fixed. In the second review, he wrote: “This singing comic book is no longer the ungodly, indecipherable mess it was in February. It's just a bore.”

The Times film critic Manohla Dargis told me that, for critics, this is not the norm. (Mr. Landman, though, recalls her wickedly funny pan of “The Cat in the Hat” for The Los Angeles Times in 2003 - written in Seussian rhyme.) “Most movies are middling,” she said. “They're fine, but they're not transporting you.”

Ms. Dargis is acutely aware of how a bad review can hurt - not only feelings, but also commercial success. This is especially true for critics at The Times; a great deal rides on the judgment of the paper of record. Some blockbuster movies, though, are “practically critic-proof,” she said. When the subject is vulnerable, one solution may be to not review at all. But sometimes that's not practical. The Times can pass on reviewing, for example, an independent filmmaker's fledgling effort or an art exhibit in a small gallery, but it is committed to reviewing major concerts, films and theater productions, whatever their quality.

Is it ever really acceptable for criticism to be so over the top, considering that there are human beings behind every venture? I think it is. That kind of brutal honesty is sometimes necessary. If it is entertaining, all the better. The exuberant pan should be an arrow in the critic's quiver, but reached for only rarely.

As for Mr. Fieri, he responded as do many who have been similarly stung. He blamed the messenger. On NBC's “Today,” he accused Mr. Wells of an agenda: “It's a great way to make a name for yourself - go after a celebrity chef who is not a New Yorker.” My sense is that Mr. Wells's heart was pure, but that the material was irresistible - even if the cuisine, awash in Donkey Sauce, was not.

Follow the public editor on Twitter at twitter.com/sulliview and read her blog at publiceditor.blogs.nytimes.com.  The public editor can also be reached by e-mail: public@nytimes.com.

A version of this op-ed appeared in print on November 25, 2012, on page SR12 of the New York edition with the headline: Reviews With ‘All Guns Blazing'.