MÖTLEY CRÜE's TOMMY LEE Blasts ESQUIRE's 'Laughable' Review Of 'The Dirt'

March 27, 2019

MÖTLEY CRÜE drummer Tommy Lee has blasted an Esquire writer over her review of the band's biopic, dismissing her as a "little girl" whose opinion of the movie is "laughable."

In her review of "The Dirt", which premiered last Friday (March 22) on Netflix, Madison Vain called the film "demeaning towards women" and said that it "never stops feeling like the bedtime story version of MÖTLEY CRÜE's reign." She went on to say: "The movie never inspires you to root for anyone. It never even makes you hate anyone. You never feel like the men are lucky for being alive — not even [bassist Nikki] Sixx, who literally died of a heroin overdose in 1987 before being revived with shots of adrenaline straight to the chest."

One day after the review was posted online, Lee took to his Twitter to slam Vain, writing: "@tweetsinvain ur review in @esquire of The Dirt was laughable. Jeff and the cast KILLED it, it was our lives, we would know 🖕🏻 Besides what are you like 30 something? Little girl you don't even know about this life ...Thanks for trying tho"

"The Dirt" currently has 42% critic score from 50 reviews on Rotten Tomatoes, the online review aggregation service that allows both critics and the public to rate movies. The same site has an 85% audience score for "The Dirt" from 841 reviews.

Vain was far from the only critic to pan "The Dirt". Indiewire called the film "wonderfully bad," saying that it "feels like it could have been made about any one of a zillion other bands." The Los Angeles Times called "The Dirt" "astoundingly tone deaf" and "as vapid and misogynistic as the band members and the book they wrote with author Neil Strauss."

The Daily Beast said that the film "spends almost two hours glamorizing shitty behavior, and then attempts to exonerate its stars with a few vague voiceovers about regret and rehabilitation." Other outlets that weighed in with negative reviews included the New York Times, The Atlantic and Deadline.

Some critics were kinder, describing "The Dirt" as a "guilty pleasure" and giving the actors who played the band credit for "working together to create such a chummy group that their power as an ensemble elevates the material. Just like their real-life counterparts."

"The Dirt" movie, which was helmed by "Jackass Presents: Bad Grandpa" director Jeff Tremaine, was picked up by Netflix after being previously developed at Focus Features and before that at Paramount.

Photo credit: Paul Brown

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