Short version: …I swear to God, some people just don’t like silly, slightly sloppy fun.
Slightly longer version: the guy whose place I held in the snack line so that he could get his pregnant wife properly situated had seen RED ONE a week earlier, and he told me it was a good bad film. …That’s fair. High Cinema it is not. But it was goofy entertainment and Christmas-y at the same time, albeit with a bunch of cussing and a highly contrived excuse to visit a beach in Aruba. When it comes on, you’ll probably like it.
I personally feel like sometimes movie critics need to grade more on a curve. This is one of those times.
Not a curve I think, more along the lines of “does it conform to the audiences expectations?” This seems to be the true disconnect we keep seeing between aggregate critic scores and Rotten Tomatoes type audience scores – each group has a different criteria of quality.
By and large, audiences have realized this and know to ignore critic’s opinions.
Critics, on the other hand, are still enamored with their own self-importance and crave validation so they despise audiences that don’t agree with them.