The Crimean Bridge. Made With Love! is a love story all right, but not the one it’s pretending to be. (Two men at the bridge’s construction site make a play for beautiful archaeology student Varya, as men at bridge construction sites are wont to do.) Instead, it was Vladimir Putin’s 2018 love letter to his sexy-sexy bridge, a multi-billion dollar project celebrating Russia’s connection to Crimea, the annexed peninsular it swiped from Ukraine a few years back.
How do we know it’s Putin propaganda? Let’s see. Written by the former head of state-funded TV channel Russia Today? Check. Budget made up mostly of federal funds? Check. Remaining dollars contributed by Putin’s business buddies? Check check check.
Now we suppose it’s possible to do an entertaining propaganda comedy about a construction project, but The Crimean Bridge. Made With Love! suggests otherwise. The film tanked hard at the Russian box office, earning back only about half of its budget of 154 million rubles.
But it fared even worse with critics, with several Russian movie sites (Rotten Turnips?) declaring it the worst movie of 2018 and one of the most terrible films of all time.
IMDB
“It’s all completely monstrous and unbearable enough to never remember the film again,” spat critic Yegor Belikov in the Russian edition of Afisha. The fact that it was a bunch of manipulative horse manure wasn’t lost on Belikov, who called it “perhaps the most bizarre, perverse and therefore unintentionally ridiculous attempt to spend public money on a film that was decided to be made on an important occasion.”