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‘Love The Coopers’ Bombs On Rotten Tomatoes Despite Other Critics Saying It’s ‘Wildly Entertaining’

By Stacey Cole
Published on: 21:17 PST, Nov 25, 2015

Love the Coopers was released this past weekend, and its performance was relatively good at $8.4 million, which was to be expected. Check out the trailer to this fabulous holiday flick.

Of course, to make a really great family holiday movie, there has to be dysfunction. Think National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation; Love, Actually; or even It’s A Wonderful Life. Bringing the family together for the holidays has a tendency to erupt in a cataclysmic display of dysfunction that is comedic and touching all at once, and Love the Coopers does not disappoint, at least not according to the feedback on Twitter.

For this reason, Love the Coopers is a highly appropriate movie for the holidays. The central couple of the movie, Sam (played by John Goodman) and Charlotte (played by Diane Keaton), are about to split up after a long marriage and the family coming for Christmas Eve dinner doesn’t know. Charlotte convinces Sam to hold off telling everyone until after the family celebration, but everyone knows things won’t go smoothly. Pete Hammond of Deadline says that the movie is wildly entertaining.

“Don’t get me wrong: This is hardly Oscar-caliber material here, but it’s certainly good-natured and even in some places wildly entertaining if you can connect to the characters.”

Even Scott Mendelson of Forbes raves about the cast and says the movie was better than he expected. But reviews are mixed, and according to the Citizen-Times, Love the Coopers has a 16/100 rating on Rotten Tomatoes, as was expected.

“Love the Coopers has the expected 16/100 rating on Rotten Tomatoes in part because critics have no tolerance for star-driven concoctions created more to fill a niche than to engage in any fresh storytelling.”

Love the Coopers was made with a budget of $17 million and directed by Jessie Nelson. The holiday meal in the movie was filmed over four days, and it was a meal of epic proportions. According to The News Tribune, Nelson said the amazing food that everyone was eating during filming put the cast into a carbo coma.

“Initially, that scene had so much energy and the actors were doing such beautiful work, and by the second or third day, I thought where is the energy? And they were all in a carbo coma. They all fell in love with Melissa’s stuffing. They all had their favorites.”

Nelson also commented on the performance of Bolt, the Saint Bernard/Australian shepherd who played the role of Rags. Nelson raved about the pooch, saying he added authenticity to Love the Coopers.

“He’s the Marlon Brando of dogs, I call him. He’s an extraordinary actor, that dog. The trainer would come to work every day having read the scene thoroughly and giving me 10 choices of how Rags could interpret the scene. He could be sad that his owners are fighting, he could be angry, he could be confused, he could put his paw over his head.”

When Love the Coopers premiered, Diane Keaton looked happy and relaxed as she and her “date,” the adorable pooch from the movie, walked down the red carpet. While at the premiere, Keaton was asked about her own career, as reported by Daily Mail.

“Of course, my career, it will always, always, always be Woody Allen. Nothing would have happened without Woody Allen. If I hadn’t been cast in that play [Play It Again, Sam]… I remember meeting him on the stage and auditioning with him. I remember thinking, I’m never going to get the part because I’m an inch taller than him.”

Check out Love the Coopers this holiday season and celebrate the classic dysfunction that makes these types of movies so great.

[Photos by Joe Scarnici, Rob Kim / Getty Images]

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