Blockbuster Movies That Just Don’t Hold Up Anymore

There’s something to be said for an uneventful weekend spent in close proximity to your tv, running through your movie archive.  Between your dvd collection (no doubt collecting dust) and whatever myriad streaming services you’re signed up for, the movie rabbit hole is both deep and dizzying.  Sometimes you want only to re-watch your all-time favorites.  Likewise, we sometimes find ourselves hitting play on something to serve more or less as white noise, which can paint the background with the occasional explosion or tracking shot while we shop on Amazon or order delivery.

That said, on more than one occasion all of us have reached back into the cinema vault and chosen something familiar and, at one time, beloved only to find that in actuality it isn’t all that great.  Few things are more depressing but it’s all too real.  The simple fact is, certain films that used to fill us with awe are now more apt to make us disapprovingly mouth “what the f***?”.

Here are a few of the guilty culprits.

Editors note: There are no Michael Bay movies included on this list for fear of going after far-too-easy targets 

Avatar (2009), Dir: James Cameron

Considering Avatar grossed over $2.7 billion worldwide in theatrical revenue, it’s safe to say that most of us saw this upon its release.  I will still admit that seeing Avatar in 3D was one of the more stupefying experiences I’ve ever had at the movies.  The immensity of the CG world that James Cameron laid out before us was truly something to behold.  The lush neon junglescape itself was escapism at its most powerful and, of course, was a career-making turn for Australian actor Sam Worthington.

Almost ten years later, though, after the novelty of its visual prowess has worn off, one can reasonably conclude that Avatar is just shy of being legitimately awful.  While the backbone of the movie was always meant to be visual storytelling, the dialogue is such hot garbage it threatens to pull you out of the movie altogether.  Between Worthington’s voiceovers, “unobtainium” and Sigourney Weaver’s protestations to token military bad guy Steven Lang, you’re better off just watching the movie on mute.

Equally as terrible is the writing itself, which, strangely enough, seemed like a story written for an Oscar-winning Kevin Costner vehicle made way back in 1990.  Dances With Wolves and/or Fern Gully quips aside, there was nothing present in nearly 162 minutes of runtime that spoke to anything larger than showing the most basic respect for nature and that it is socially acceptable to date women who are much, much taller than you.

Sure, you get your requisite action scenes of creatures that look like they were painted at Burning Man fighting all manner of future tech.  You get your romance fix in the form of alien warriors connecting their HDMI chords to one another and you also fully get the sense that it must be nice to be James Cameron and get filthy, stupidly rich making this stuff.

Avatar’s long-standing contribution to cinema will forever be helping shape the future of motion-capture and furthering CGI as a technology.  Beyond that, though, James Cameron’s journey to Pandora is big and blue and terminally hollow.  With multiple sequels planned into the foreseeable future, I find myself feeling that this is all just a needless exercise in commercial excess.  The Na’vi would probably rather us all just stay on our own planet.  I tend to agree.

Any Given Sunday (1999), Dir: Oliver Stone

I remember a kind of visceral thrill sitting down in front of the screen for one of my first R-rated movies.  Not that I hadn’t seen R-rated movies before Any Given Sunday, because I’d seen a lot (sorry, mom), but being in the theater, next to my dad, around a bunch of grown-ass adults, was just a different level.  To be sure, I was fully-locked in throughout the entire spectacle of Oliver Stone’s camera twisting, swerving and meandering through his platinum hued vision of football and sin and excess.

19 years and countless sports movies later, Stone’s meditation on professional football can barely hold itself together.  To be fair, I’ve never been the biggest Oliver Stone fan and this film is typically the example I use when explaining my position.  It’s not that it says anything wrong about the nature of the NFL and the set-apart world its athletes, owners and hangers-on inhabit, it’s just that does it in the same way that Nickleback tries to write powerful songs about love.

There are some great performances: Jamie Foxx succeeds at both the bravado and humility of a sudden star thrust into a position he doesn’t fully grasp.  James Woods is deliciously sleazy as the team doctor and Al Pacino, all fire and old school brimstone, is fantastic as a coach at the end of his rope.  Conversely, though, the film fails to hold up because Stone reaches for some artistic truth that may or may not exist in this gridiron sandbox that he’s built.

Football players are ‘gladiators’ and ‘warriors’ because you’re told so 50 different times while Ben Hur plays in the background (for, ya know, reference).  Lauren Holly’s character, married to Dennis Quaid’s saint of a league veteran, was basically written as “worst wife EVER” and she is.  Though, it’s fair to acknowledge that Cameron Diaz’s opportunistic team owner is probably worse and doesn’t have a single redeeming quality.

Then there are lazy remarks on racism,  there is gratuitous frontal nudity to spare and every type of unnecessary camera angle designed to distract you from the fact that this is a less-engrossing, overwrought episode of Hard Knocks.  In football, the greatest moments occur when players let the game come to them and try not to overthink things.  It’s too bad Oliver Stone didn’t get that memo.

Mission Impossible II (2000), Dir: John Woo

In a way, you can’t blame movies in the first half of the 2000’s to so heavily fetishize the slow-mo, hyper-stylized action that made The Matrix instant time capsule material.  So it only seems natural that a director like John Woo, whose entire back catalogue is basically A-listers doing things with guns in slow-mo, would pump Tom Cruise’s Ethan Hunt full of commercial-grade jet fuel and roll cameras.

Brian De Palma’s Mission Impossible, which launched a series that is now seven films deep, is still fantastic.  Without firing a single shot throughout the film, Cruise still pulls off tradecraft and train-leaping with equal efficiency while sneaking through a classic “whodunit” spy caper.  From the opening moments of MI:II, it’s immediately evident that Woo and co. have crafted a far different beast.

Between the now trademark freefall into a confined, death-laden space to a physics-defying car chase and several sequences where the human body would, in reality, shatter into a million pieces, nothing is off-limits.  As if there weren’t enough visual cues that you should be throwing things at the screen every five minutes, Woo allows Limp Bizkit to serenade you with the musical equivalent of a surge slurpee.

The characters are written predictably terribly, the CGI doves that added that extra element in Face/Off are here and Dougray Scott, hot on the trail of a viral McGuffin (viles of Mountain Dew and Mountain Dew: Code Red, probably), serviceably channels his frustration over not getting to play Wolverine into his role as penciled-in bad guy.  Even Anthony Hopkins was able to take the weekend off to try and lend some measure of credibility to a movie that was being shot next to the soundstage where they were doing  Creed’s video for ‘Higher’.

Mission Impossible II, ultimately, was victimized by the era it was made in.  TRL, Fred Durst, Tom Cruise with long hair: all things that seemed alright back in 2000.  Now, we laugh. We point and we laugh.  Tropic Thunder, which Tom Cruise was tremendous in, was made to wink knowingly at movies like this.  I can’t remember the last time I saw CGI doves floating ethereally past the camera moments before 8,000 bullets scream through the frame and, honestly, I don’t know if I ever need to again.

X-Men (2000), Dir: Bryan Singer

Before Marvel owned what seems to be the charted universe, it was a pretty daring, pretty novel endeavor to bring to life something like the X-Men.  Had social utilities like Twitter, Instagram and Reddit been around at the time Bryan Singer was breaking ground on the first of many mutant sagas to come, there probably would have been waaay more palpable outrage over what was on its way to the big screen.

That said, Singer’s X-Men was by no means a critical or financial failure.  In fact it was good enough to launch a franchise that has constantly pumped out sequels and spin-offs alike for the better part of 20 years.  The core elements, the ones that fans really care about, are all there: Wolverine, Professor X, Cyclops, Magneto, Storm, Wolverine trying to steal Cyclops’ girl.  Other elements are present, too: leather motorcycle suits with no tactical functionality, horrifically stale CGI, fight scenes on codeine, Hallie Berry’s pseudo accent, a movie score written by Hugh Jackman while he was on the treadmill.  Simply put, this film now just seems at odds with itself.

I mean, how do you honestly explain to fans that Wolverine and Metallica roadie-Sabertooth don’t recognize one another?  That’s like Guy Fieri not recognizing pizza.

You almost wish that they waited another ten or so years for this movie to be made.  At that point, perhaps, visual effects could have made the types of things they attempted in this movie much more visually enthralling.  Perhaps Marvel and 20th Century Fox could have struck a deal to send Xavier and co. back to their natural home.  Perhaps they could have seen that Anna Paquin’s spin on Rogue was a frustrating wet blanket in desperate need of a re-write.

Whatever the reason may be, X-Men doesn’t have nearly enough redeeming qualities to stand on its own.  X2 and Days of Future Past are far more compelling entries to the X-Men universe and still, despite the success of both of those films, you get the sense that the X-Men we’ve all waited to see since those Saturday mornings long ago is still out there on the drawing board.

Spider-Man 3 (2007), Dir: Sam Raimi

Whether you agree with the idea that Raimi’s first two Spider-Man movies are seminal in the superhero pantheon (I plead the fifth), the third and final installment of Raimi’s Spiderverse, upon its release, was arguably the most hyped-up superhero movie ever.  As a reference point, this was over a year prior to both Iron Man and The Dark Knight hitting theaters, so the monolith of comic book movies that we have today hadn’t quite been stood up, yet.  Regardless, the first two movies in Raimi’s trilogy grossed over $1.6 billion at the worldwide box office, so the impetus on knocking the series conclusion out of the park and into the next county cannot be understated.

So…What. The. Hell.

You can look around to other comic book properties and their respective film series and find plenty of fault.  But Spider-Man 3 is far and away the most egregious offender when it comes to taking something with light years-worth of potential and doing basically the worst possible things to it.

There are too many villains, first off.  James Franco’s Harry Osborne/Goblin is tasked with treading through about four different layers of consciousness before he’s found his heroic streak at the end of the third act, at which point none of us really cared.  Thomas Haden Church’s Sandman was basically a plot device to show off new, cutting-edge CGI.  Spidey himself treads a little too close to the dark side which, judging by the way Peter Parker’s transformation was handled, no one thought the audience was intelligent enough to grasp his descent into quasi-madness.  Tobey Maguire’s dance choreography while morphing into emo Pete in real-time is still maddening and I refuse to believe it ever actually happened.

Then, exhales slowly, then there’s Venom.  All your collective outrage over DC’s reimagining of the Joker in Suicide Squad and how Shane Black “revealed” the Mandarin in Iron Man 3 should pale in comparison to what Sam Raimi and co. did to Venom.  It’s a capital offense.  You knew, walking into Spider-Man 3 that Spidey’s greatest and most celebrated villain would turn up.  That, at least in 2007, was reason enough to buy a ticket.  Not only did the end result feel like the studio ham-fisting the character into the movie so close to post-production it felt like Topher Grace was doing re-shoots while he was walking down the red carpet, the fact that they cast Topher Grace in the part at all was infuriating.

Had they just left Venom out of the movie, perhaps the masses would be more merciful about the whole undertaking and look back on Spider-Man 3 with a shred of mercy.  Unfortunately, that line was crossed and from across that threshold there is no return.  Spider-Man 3 released, it made gobs of money despite itself, it ended, it squirmed around on the ground in its oily, self-indulgent form as people walked past it in utter disgust.  This movie doesn’t even qualify for the “so bad it’s good” camp.  It’s rotten and vile to the core.  I haven’t even attempted to watch it since about three years ago when it was on FX and I had nothing else to do.  About ten minutes in, I pulled out my sock drawer and started to reorganize.  It was riveting, in comparison.

The Dark Knight Rises (2012), Dir: Christopher Nolan

This one HURTS.  Not even because I consider Chris Nolan the class of directors currently working, but because his Dark Knight trilogy is such a milestone in contemporary film-making.  Before Nolan broke ground on Batman Begins, there simply wasn’t a precedent set for taking a character like Batman and representing him with such care and such reverence.  Not over-the-top gothic like Tim Burton’s films or just plain unrecognizable like the mess Joel Schumaker helmed, Christopher Nolan’s Batman films, as a collective, stand apart.

So shedding light on Rises is painful, then, for a number of reasons.  While I will always consider the first act and a half of this movie as being close to phenomenal, the weight of expectations, of portent evident in the film and just trying to out-Nolan himself lead to Nolan’s third entry in his Batman trilogy to burst at the seams.  Call this a natural by-product of directing The Dark Knight, the bar that was set for this movie was stratospheric one has to wonder if it was ever meant to be cleared.  Still, that doesn’t account for the accumulated talent at Nolan’s disposal to think that a god-awful character reveal and a nuclear bomb was the proper send-off this trilogy deserved.  Nor does it account for what are pretty glaring plot holes that are never fully addressed.

Lots has been said about Bane as a villain and while I still argue that he was [mostly] great, rendering him a love-struck henchman following orders from his former boss’s daughter just sucked.  All his machinations, all the things that made him such a sinister, physical threat to Batman were basically kicked in the teeth.  Sucked for the character, sucked for us as an audience.

In addition there are things that Batman, in Nolan’s universe, should and shouldn’t be able to do.  He should be able to find out, with relative ease, Miranda Tate’s real identity (he’s a detective, a good one) and he should be able to pretty effortlessly battle the legality of falsified finger prints used to purchase millions and millions of dollars in futures funds.  Then there are things Batman shouldn’t be able to do, like physically beat dozens of trained, armed men after being sedentary for eight years (haunting your own mansion in a smoking robe does not qualify as exercise) or suffer any discernable injuries after being stabbed with a very large knife.  Then, of course there’s the one-two punch of Marion Cotillard’s death scene, which was horrendous, and Batman’s eventual escape from a nuclear blast (HOW?) which we’re mean to just, kind of, accept.

Perhaps most unrealistic of all is that we’re supposed to believe that John ROBIN Blake is Batman’s heir apparent.  This is the guy who got disarmed by a wounded Jim Gordon in a hospital gown.  Unless someone is paying for him to go to combat camp for seven years, Blake isn’t battling anything except the chill of Gotham winter.

Performances across the board are great.  The movie looks (in most cases) beautiful.  There are moments, more than a few, where you really feel that the writing is hitting directly on the emotional core of the whole series, that Bruce is finally picking himself up and making good on the mission he set out on years prior.  But, there’s something lacking here, as well.  Some of the story elements feel almost penciled in, as if Nolan and his team were so gassed when they neared the finish line that they implemented only outlines of bigger, unfinished ideas.  The Dark Knight could stand alone without being bookended by Begins and Rises and for better or worse, set the standard that Rises tried pretty diligently to hold to.  While I will never regard this movie as an outright failure as there are things about it that I genuinely love.  However, as time goes on, the more aware of its shortcomings I become and additionally, the more I’m reminded of how great this movie could have been.

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