Just How Bad Is 'Ella McCay'?

Ella McCay opened last December with a meager $2 million weekend and dreadful reviews on its way to a $4.5 million gross against a $35 million budget. It basically disappeared from theaters before the doors even opened, so we missed our window to review it. Now? It’s streaming on Disney, and I can confidently say that… it’s maybe even worse than you might imagine.

Ella McCay currently sits at 23 percent on Rotten Tomatoes, which feels about 23 percent too generous. Even the handful of positive reviews from credible critics mostly praise it with backhanded compliments, like how “refreshingly weird” it is. If that were the intent — if James L. Brooks were a refreshingly weird kind of director — I could squint hard enough to allow it. But James L. Brooks is not a “weird” director. He’s the guy behind As Good As It Gets, Terms of Endearment, and Broadcast News. He’s also a three-time Oscar winner, which I suspect is the only reason he was able to land such a great cast 15 years after How Do You Know — his last movie with a great cast (Reese Witherspoon, Owen Wilson, Paul Rudd, Jack Nicholson) — bombed.

At any rate, Ella McCay is less weird than it is inexplicable. Brooks is a ’90s director with a ’90s sensibility who made a ’90s movie in 2025, and if it were just that, I could probably appreciate its throwback qualities. But that’s not entirely it. It’s a bad ’90s movie: ill-formed, half-considered, and featuring some of the worst acting I’ve ever seen in a major studio motion picture. And I can’t even blame the actors. These were clearly choices pushed on them by Brooks, received by performers who must have assumed that, because James L. Brooks is James L. Brooks, he must know what he’s doing.

I don’t think he does.

I cannot imagine Jack Lowden (Slow Horses) deciding to play an endearingly goofy, harebrained dolt who behaves like a puppy dog until the movie suddenly assassinates his character in the final 20 minutes for reasons that don’t make a lot of sense. It’s like he’s trying to channel John Hughes-era Anthony Michael Hall, and that’s just not who Jack Lowden is.

It’s hard to even describe what the movie is about. Emma Mackey plays Ella McCay, the youngest governor in state history, appointed after the governor and her mentor (Albert Brooks) accept jobs in the presidential cabinet (the politics of Ella McCay are maybe the most anachronistic thing about the movie). Ella comes from a dysfunctional family: her estranged dad (Woody Harrelson) was a womanizer who was cheating on Ella’s mother (Rebecca Hall) after her funeral, which also feels kind of quaint in 2025 as the basis for a severely traumatic childhood.

Now she’s married to Ryan (Lowden), who seems like a nice guy… until he isn’t. She’s also staring down a scandal only days into her administration: She apparently had sex with her husband in the governor’s office, which violates some dusty, meaningless law that only exists so the plot can happen. Ryan then completely botches an attempt to kill the story and somehow makes it worse.

Meanwhile, Ella’s dad reenters the picture in an attempt to reconcile, she’s getting life advice from her aunt (Jamie Lee Curtis) who helped raise her, and her brother is a reclusive but wealthy mess whose presence in this movie makes zero sense — except that he enables Ayo Edebiri to pop in for one of the most genuinely nonsensical scenes I’ve ever seen in a studio film.

I don’t really know how else to describe it, except as a ’90s romcom with the energy of Jupiter Ascending. The character choices are completely irrational, the stakes are nonexistent, and it’s apparently meant to be an anti-romcom — except it doesn’t have the urgency or clarity of one. Instead, it has the vibe of a Disney Channel sitcom where the governor ends up with her driver, who is played delightfully by Kumail Nanjiani, but feels like he wandered onto this set from an entirely different movie.

It’s honestly a movie you almost have to see to understand just how bad it is. It’s erratic. It’s herky-jerky. It feels like a screenplay with several missing pages and half a dozen pages accidentally swapped in from an episode of The Simpsons. I don’t get it, and I don’t understand how anyone read this script and thought it was a good idea to sign on — except that they trusted James L. Brooks, and by the time they realized what a disaster it was, it was too late to back out.

But then again, I almost appreciate Ella McCay for just how spectacularly bad it is. An algorithm could never come up with something this incoherent. Nor could AI. It would probably crash ChatGPT. There’s so little rhyme or reason to any of it that a large language model would simply short-circuit.

And for that, at least, I suppose Ella McCay qualifies as a minor achievement.