The Worst Kevin Costner Movie, According To Rotten Tomatoes

If you grew up on such films as “Ace Ventura: Pet Detective,” “The Nutty Professor,” and “Liar Liar,” you likely know the name Tom Shadyac. The writer/director made a name for himself with these now beloved family comedies. You might remember his first detour from such fare with the critically-panned but commercially successful “Patch Adams,” but chances are you’ve never heard of his follow-up.

Shadyac’s 2002 supernatural thriller “Dragonfly” was every bit as maudlin as “Patch Adams” but it also had the distinction of being a bona fide box office dud, making $52 million on a $60 million budget. Trying something different is often to be commended, but the guy who directed “Ace Ventura” helming a film about a widowed doctor whose dead wife contacts him through patients doesn’t seem like the most well-advised career move. Still, if you’ve got Kevin Costner fronting your bizarre drama, you might be in with a chance of making something half-decent. 

By 2002, Costner was at a strange place career-wise, coming off the critically-panned but commercially successful “Message in a Bottle” in 1999 and the well-received but commercially disappointing “Thirteen Days” in 2000. But there’s no doubt he was an established star by that point, having already won his Oscars for “Dances with Wolves” a decade prior and fronting “Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves,” “The Bodyguard,” and “Waterworld” in the interim — some of Kevin Costner’s best movies.

Unfortunately, even a star of his magnitude couldn’t save Shadyac’s ill-advised 2002 film, which currently stands as Costner’s lowest-rated movie on Rotten Tomatoes .

In “Dragonfly,” Kevin Costner plays Joe Darrow, a doctor at a Chicago hospital where his wife, Dr. Emily Darrow (Susanna Thompson) also works. After Emily dies on a trip to Venezuela to help Amazonian natives, Joe has a series of strange experiences: patients tell him they saw visions of Emily, lightbulbs break out of nowhere, and Joe hears his wife’s voice coming through patients that are clinically dead. It all seems to be telling him something about his late wife, so he eventually travels to Venezuela where he finds out the truth in a finale that is supposed to be moving but, as TimeOut put it in a review, ends up being “predictable as it is a long time coming.”

That’s actually one of the nicer things critics said about “Dragonfly,” which at the time of writing, has a 7% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Of the 125 reviews collected on the site, 36 come from Top Critics, and only one of those reviews is positive. While Variety’s Joe Leydon found the film to be a “fitfully affecting tale of love beyond death and faith beyond reason,” he was apparently the only one. In a far less charitable review, the Chicago Reader‘s Jonathan Rosenbaum wrote, “The undisputed king of the cornball concept, Kevin Costner has an uncanny aptitude for gravitating toward the dopiest projects in sight, but this time he’s outdone himself.” Jonathan Foreman of the New York Post, meanwhile, put it much more tersely, calling the movie, “Sappy, mechanical tripe.”

Elsewhere, A. O. Scott of the New York Times quipped he felt “powerfully drawn toward the light — the light of the exit sign,” while the LA Times’ Kevin Thomas concluded that it was “impossible to find the film anything but appalling, shamelessly manipulative and contrived, and totally lacking in conviction.” Beyond that 7% rating, then, all that critical opprobrium adds up to a 3.8 out of 10 average rating and a critical consensus that reads, “Sappy, dull, and muddled, ‘Dragonfly’ is too melancholic and cliched to generate much suspense.”

Back in 1997, Kevin Costner directed and starred in “The Postman,” a post-apocalyptic drama that saw the actor play the titular nomad who inspires hope in a small settler community after finding the uniform of a postman and using it to pretend the United States government has been re-established in Minneapolis. If that sounds like a “Dragonfly”-level disaster, it almost was.

“The Postman” was a colossal box office flop that almost ended Costner’s career, and currently has a 14% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, with an average rating of just 3.2 out of 10. You might think would make it the actor’s lowest-rated film ever. But as far as Rotten Tomatoes goes, “The Postman” is Costner’s second lowest-rated, with “Dragonfly” managing to edge out his self-directed blunder. That should tell you just how bad Tom Shadyac’s movie really is.

Meanwhile Costner is dealing with the box office failure of his passion project, “Horizon: An American Saga — Chapter 1,” which thankfully at least found success on VOD, and fared better than “Dragonfly” critically, with a 51% rating on Rotten Tomatoes.