When pretty much every critic in the civilised world hates your movie, finding a decent quote to stick on the press advertisements can prove to be quite a challenge. For Sony, it had a tougher assignment than most with its UK release of Jackie Chan vehicle The Spy Next Door, a film that it's fair to say is not in the Oscar running for next year.

Following its US release earlier this year, it's sat with a Rotten Tomatoes rating of, er, 11%. The general consensus of critical opinion can be summed up with the following quotes:

* When even the out-take bloopers over the final credits are weak, you know you've got a pretty under-par Jackie Chan movie on your hands. (The Guardian)

* A mirthless, unimaginative piece of entertainment.  (Screen International)

* Yet another lazily kid-pleasing comedy about a man unprepared for fatherhood who's suddenly saddled with children who hate his guts and whom he must win over in order to make time with their hot single mom. (Washington Post)

* The Spy Next Door is precisely what you would expect from a PG-rated Jackie Chan comedy with that plot. If that's what you're looking for, you won't be disappointed. It's not what I was looking for. (Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times)

There's the odd positive comment, but nothing that would warrant excising key passages to stick on an advert. Sony, therefore, needed to hatch a plan ahead of the UK release, which finally took place last Friday.

But what do you put on the poster? You can hardly add the words "From The Director Of Beethoven, The Flintstones and Jingle All The Way", such is the pedigree of its director Brian Levant. And even appreciating that The Spy Next Door is supposedly a film for the younger audience, it's hard to find a collection of five words or more that have been written with any kind of affection towards the film.

But then Sony had a masterstroke. And as such, as you can see in the picture below, The Spy Next Door all of a sudden had its champions. It had the people willing to put their neck on their line, to say that the film is "Awesome", and worth "A million out of 5".

Just take a look at this advert that appeared in a Sunday newspaper. From a distance, The Spy Next Door looks suitably acclaimed, and a critical darling. Maybe we Brits just warmed to Jackie Chan movies more than our America cousins, and as such, we couldn't wait to shower his latest film with joys. Either way, the critics appeared to be rapturous...

Blimey, that's some acclaim the film is notching up there. But hang on: what's this? Let's just zoom in a little bit there, and see if you can spot what Sony's done here...

You spotted it yet? Or do we need to zoom in just a little bit closer?

Yep. Not one of those 'critics' is over six years old.

This is, clearly, a great future strategy for any film. After all, who cares if the stuffy old critics don't like the film you've got to sell? There's always someone who likes just about any film on the planet, and the job is simply to find them. It's a genius idea that we're surprised nobody has thought of before.

Just think how much easier marketing the last Police Academy film would have been had its PR team simply scoured the local pubs and found someone troll-eyed enough to declare, "It's a bloody masterpiece." Then, with the use of a suitably small font in the right place, the world barely needs to know that only an inebriated man at the end of a heavy night who couldn't enough pronounce his own name and wanted to simply be called ‘Brenda' was the source of the opinion.

And heck, the people with the job of marketing the next Uwe Boll opus must already be waiting outside the school gates with a bag of sweeties, hoping to get someone to say something half-decent that can be cobbled together on the DVD sleeve.

Yet back to Sony. On the plus side, its collection of quotes and comments did refute the review written by Ty Burr of the Boston Globe, who noted that, "The film's so formulaic your 6-year-old will be ticking off the plot points as they lope by." Turns out, Sony found a bunch of six-year-olds who liked it just fine.

But it still comes to something when the only people you can find to say anything nice about a title are under the age of seven. It's not even that that age group appears to be the primary target audience for the film, given that it carries a PG rating with a warning of "moderate comic action violence". Surely that makes it a more appropriate film for a child of perhaps seven, eight or nine years old?

That said, maybe everyone in that age group simply thought The Spy Next Door was shit...

The Spy Next Door is now playing in UK cinemas.