Armond White has become notorious as kind of the Skip Bayless of film criticism; he's a contrarian who finds pseudo-intellectual ways to defend trash and then turns around and trashes everything else. Recently, Roger Ebert tried to defend him but it took a day or so for his readers to point out how bad White really is. Ebert ended up labeling White a smart, insightful troll.

I never really paid attention to White's reviews but I read his take on GI Joe and it's one of the worst reviews I've ever read in my life. I can see defending GI Joe as mindless, escapist fun (although I'd disagree) but White tries to raise it up and act like it actually has something to say. Even worse, he's just plain wrong on a couple of things.

In a parenthetical aside, White writes, "Christopher Eccleston and Sienna Miller, whose British accents add to their villainy". Really? Because Eccleston's Destro had a Scottish accent and, while I can't really remember it, I'm not sure Miller even had much of an accent, nor should she have since I assumed that she was supposed to be an American. If not, I'm not sure how her boyfriend was the All-American Duke and her brother was also an American soldier. Even if she did have an accent, it wasn't nearly as strong as that of Adewale Akinnouye-Agbaje's Heavy Duty, one of the key members of GI Joe. 

That's a simple mistake but the part that really made me laugh out loud was his take on the acting. Now maybe White was meaning to be sarcastic here but, if so, he didn't do a great job of it.

As for acting, operatives Tatum and Wayans look great in their special Accelerator suits, surging through the air, tumbling and weaving in dreamlike acrobatics to gladden the wide-eyed part of your aesthetic sensibility. Like race cars approaching Mach speed, they dodge missile plumes, then zoom toward the soon-to-be-legendary Eiffel Tower sequence. Maybe it’s revenge for Franco-snobbery after 9/11. Perhaps it’s also decadent exercise of CGI license (carrying an inherent warning about technological excess), but like the aircraft carrier and Great Pyramid sequences of Transformers 2: Wow.

So basically, "As for acting, the CGI was great." Again, maybe he was being sarcastic but it really comes off as if he's trying to argue that the film was saying something with its overabundance of CGI. I'm sure he'd use this same line of thinking to defend the fact that a surprising amount of the CGI was poorly done.

Armond White is practically indefensible. At first glance of the list of his likes and dislikes, I thought that perhaps he was more voice of the people shrouded in intellectual gobbledygook. Unfortunately, he shakes off the "Man of the People" crown by disliking every Pixar film, both Iron Man and Dark Knight, and The Hangover.

I think Armond White simply takes the contrarian view in order to be able to try to argue a certain belief. If a film is somehow related to a point of view he holds but doesn't really take a stand on, then he can say whatever he wants. He can yammer on about his personal opinion and will mistake that for liking a film. He reminds me of a friend who likes bad films because he gets to read into them and extract lessons and insights that aren't actually there. He sees films more as a creative thinking process. It's almost like he enjoys talking about films more than actually watching them. If a film is vapid, it gives room for any sort of interpretation. Any insight a film actually brings to the table just gets in the way and is discarded as "preachy".

And this is the worst part about Armond White. He doesn't seem to judge films on their own merits, rather his ratings are based on what he can add, what arguments he can conjure. Now, doing this every so often can be fun but when it's the very core of your film criticism, you become a "troll" to your peers and completely useless to your readers because they really can't trust your take on the films themselves.

In the end, Armond White should review individual films. He might be able to write an interesting criticism of a group of films or a movement in modern cinema but as for reviewing films on their own merits (nevermind guide people to films they should or shouldn't see), he's useless.