“If you read between the lines, it’s not that bad."

Said Rob Reiner after reading Roger Ebert's famous "Hated It" review out loud, for laughs:

It's a funny punchline, reminiscent of "Dumb and Dumber"'s "So you're telling me, there's a chance?"

But what was it that bothered Ebert so much about Reiner's movie, "North"?

Here's more of Ebert's review:

[The main character is] a kid with inattentive parents, who decides to go into court, free himself of them, and go on a worldwide search for nicer parents. This idea is deeply flawed. Children do not lightly separate from their parents – and certainly not on the evidence provided here, where the great parental sin is not paying attention to their kid at the dinner table. The parents (Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Jason Alexander) have provided little North with what looks like a million-dollar house in a Frank Capra neighborhood, all on dad’s salary as a pants inspector.

"They needed Bruce Willis … and Willis may have needed them. There may have been a sincere effort..."

"... on the part of his agents and managers to keep him busy and engaged, as a way to delay the worst of what his disease would eventually bring. However, at a certain point, most likely sometime in the last two years if reports are correct, a health line seems to have been crossed. But the work continued." 

Writes Joe Ferullo in "Hollywood failed Bruce Willis" (The Hill). 

Willis made 21 movies in the last 4 years.

Directors were asked to keep the star’s dialogue short and his days on set to a minimum. Even that reportedly was sometimes challenging for the actor. Despite all this, film roles kept coming.... The majority were low budget efforts, often $10 million or less, compared to an average $65 million budget for a mainstream studio production. The movies were typically violent action stories that sell well internationally.... Independent producers — working outside the big studio system — have to raise the money on their own for these films. The most important sales tool they have is the movie’s poster.... It’s far easier to get backing if your poster includes the face of a well-known actor....

There's an old term: "exploitation film."