Brett Ratner is right. Sort of. The director of the Rush Hour films has launched a passionate denunciation of the movie review aggregation site Rotten Tomatoes. I’m giving his attack a “semi-fresh” rating.

Ratner says: “The worst thing that we have in today’s movie culture is Rotten Tomatoes. I think it’s the destruction of our business.” Well I don’t know about that, but it’s certainly hurting the art of conversing about film. Whenever someone solemnly invokes a Rotten Tomatoes score you can feel the conversation become paralysed.

Rotten Tomatoes was launched in 1998 and became an immediate success with its stat-gimmick of mulching up a range of film reviews to produce a generalised percentage score for each film. The guys at Rotten Tomatoes assess the reviews from an international gallery of English-language critics, including me, for each film, and basically decide whether it is good or “fresh” (marked with a ripe red tomato) or negative or “rotten” (marked with a splattered yucky tomato). That’s it: good or bad, rotten or fresh. Nuance is out. Then the movies that rated above 75% are certified fresh, over 60% is fresh and 59% or under is rotten.

Ratner is furious because they put a real downer on Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, a film that his company RatPac Entertainment co-produced. “I have such respect and admiration for film criticism. When I was growing up, film criticism was a real art. And there was intellect that went into that. And you would read Pauline’s Kael’s reviews, or some others, and that doesn’t exist any more. Now it’s about a number. A compounded number of how many positives v negatives. Now it’s about, ‘What’s your Rotten Tomatoes score?’ And that’s sad, because the Rotten Tomatoes score was so low on Batman v Superman I think it put a cloud over a movie that was incredibly successful.”

Hmm. The problem with Batman v Superman was not Rotten Tomatoes. The problem with Batman v Superman was Batman v Superman. But that is another issue. Ratner has a point about the dumbing down that Rotten Tomatoes represents. A range of critics with quite different styles, quite different viewpoints, quite different approaches and quite different prejudices cannot meaningfully be reduced to an average. But even here I can’t find myself blaming the site, which is perfectly free to offer its spurious non-facts in a spirit of mischief or idleness or anti-infotainment.

What I worry about is the people who bizarrely invoke it as an objective measure. It’s incredible how many times I’ve had conversations with people who appear to be in possession of a working brain, say: “Ah, but it only got 62% on Rotten Tomatoes” as if they have said something meaningful or even interesting.

Now of course many will say that critics have brought this on themselves with the star-rating system – one star to five stars – which has become the Esperanto of arts journalism. It is the star rating system which has, arguably, made reviewing susceptible to this sort of bogus aggregation. Well, I myself have no problem with the star system, which actually prevents critics fence-sitting and retreating into ambiguity. If critics are good at their job, the reader will want to find out what they’ve got to say underneath the stars. If they are good enough, then readers will seek out their views, independently of Rotten Tomatoes.

As for Rotten Tomatoes itself, let’s aggregate a range of imaginary reviews for the site. Reviewer A might praise the way it gives Joe Normal a quick guide to what’s good and what’s bad. Reviewer B might write 800 words attacking its colour scheme, particularly the band of green across the top of the screen, which confusingly appears to reference the condition of being unripe or undeveloped, a concept which is nowhere else alluded to. Reviewer C might write a long screed attacking the name itself, which betrays an institutional bias towards tomato-throwing and snarkiness. But Reviewer D might write a rave about how great the videos are. And Reviewer E will attack the Rotten Tomatoes podcast which sells out the site’s concept of objectivity by getting its staff to offer their own subjective opinions. So that’s a 40% rating of positive reviews – rotten. But it still tells us nothing about the site.

• This article was amended on 30 March 2017 to clarify that Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice was co-produced by Brett Ratner’s company. An earlier version described him as “the producer” of the film.