'There seems to be a Special Tone': Why Britney Spears is a five star film critic

The coronavirus crisis hasn’t been kind to performers. On a practical scale, schedules have been wiped and income reduced to zero. But psychologically, it also means that the planet’s biggest extroverts have been robbed of an outlet. They have all this pent-up desire for approval, and nowhere to put it.

Until now, this has largely manifested itself in slightly cringey iPhone videos uploaded to the internet. But now Britney Spears, that bold pioneer, has opened up a whole new avenue of quarantined expression. That’s right, she has become a film reviewer.

The first fruits of Britney’s side-hustle appeared last night, as she posted her review of the Robert Downey Jr film Dolittle on Instagram. It reads:

Now, it’s easy to mock Spears for this. The capitalisation of “Special Tone”. The term “I find hard to find”. The implication that the plot was slightly too complex for her. The fact that she is posting a critical rave for a film that not only contains a climactic scene where Robert Downey Jr frantically pulls a bagpipe from a dragon’s bum, but is currently on schedule to be the biggest commercial flop of the year.

After all, Britney’s assessment of the film is quite the outlier. Compare her Dolittle rave with the Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw review, which called the film “horribly inert”. Or Empire, which deemed it “lacklustre”. Or Total Film, which described it as “lifeless and dead-eyed”. Or NPR, who decided it was less a film and more “a crime scene in need of forensic analysis”. Perhaps Britney was expecting less of Dolittle. Perhaps she uses a different set of criteria to evaluate cinema. Perhaps she watched the wrong film by accident. We may never know.

However, take a look at Rotten Tomatoes and you’ll find that her view is much more closely aligned to the public than the critics. The professionals gave Dolittle a miserable 15%. The general public, on the other hand, awarded it a mighty 76%. And Britney’s post – essentially “nice animals, good clothes, bit confusing in places” – reads exactly like a 76% review. In layman’s terms, this means that Spears has her finger on the pulse of public opinion. She understands what we want, and she always has, because she is one of us.

And, don’t forget, Dolittle is a flop. Far fewer people went to see it than anticipated, so there’s a real chance that Spears’ praise will inspire hundreds of thousands to seek it out. It might even dig the film out of the mire a little. For a successful actor such as Spears (no, really; her 2002 film Crossroads made its budget back five times over, making it a much hotter commercial property than Dolittle) to reach down and help an underdog like this shows a lot of class.

Now we just have to sit back and wait to see what she reviews next. Will she continue to buck the critical trend, by slagging off Uncut Gems or embracing Playmobil: The Movie? Will she maintain her dedication to focusing on underperforming releases, by reviewing UglyDolls or The Goldfinch? How on earth will she use emojis to convey the Special Tone of Colour Out of Space or The Hunt? Either way, she has to review more films. Her public demands it.