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Biggest Cinematic Let Downs

Started by Barberism, May 19, 2010, 11:37:42 AM

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Barberism

Has there ever been a movie you were looking forward to that left you underwhelmed?

Is there a film you otherwise enjoyed but a certain thing you were looking forward to seeing turned out disappointing? A historically inaccurate potrayal? An adaption that toyed too much with the source material?

I thought Invictus was an ok movie. But I thought the way the Haka was filmed was really underwhelming. It may not have been of great interest to American viewers or non-rugby fans. But the Haka is awesome and most televised sporting events do a much better job of showing it.

I thought King Arthur (2004) was ok. But couldn't get past the fact they did a big budget version of King Arthur with all of the mythology taken out.

They've made a new Robin Hood movie where Mark Strong is playing Guy of Gisbourne... no wait he's called Sir Godfrey. I know it's a fanboyish complaint but why change the name if it is essentially meant to be the same character?

Biggest let down at the cinema would have to be "The League of Gentlemen's Apocalypse." That movie left me thoroughly whelmed.

So this thread is for films you were looking forward to and let you down in some way. Even if you really enjoy it there is usually some character or line of dialogue you would wish they had left out.

Sorry. Rambling.

Egyptian Feast

Public Enemies was a huge let-down. It had huge potential, but Christ it was dull. The previous Dillinger films with Laurence Tierney and Warren Oates had their faults, but were infinitely more entertaining. John Milius' Dillinger may have cost more than a hundred times less than Public Enemies, yet it felt much more authentic and convincing. And fun.

Michael Mann is an interesting filmmaker, but the only film of his I like unreservedly is Manhunter. I loved Heat at the cinema, but it didn't work for me at all on subsequent viewings.

Jemble Fred

Quote from: Barberism on May 19, 2010, 11:37:42 AM
They've made a new Robin Hood movie where Mark Strong is playing Guy of Gisbourne... no wait he's called Sir Godfrey. I know it's a fanboyish complaint but why change the name if it is essentially meant to be the same character?

Funnily enough I thought the same thing – but at the same time, have to admit that the character's really not Gisbourne, he doesn't occupy the same status or fill the same role at all. He's
Spoiler alert
a French spy, and besides the whole movie is an origin story, so you couldn't kill Gisbourne off (as they do Godfrey) and then have the tale continue.
[close]
But having said all that, it was such a dumb arbitrary hotchpotch of a story, with little or no historical or literary accuracy, so they could have called him Crazy Dave and it wouldn't have made much difference.

Johnny Textface

The Matrix sequels and  Southland Tales are a couple of recent dogshit fests that hurt me.

Shoulders?-Stomach!

I don't think I need to repeat my feelings about The Golden Compass and The Dark Knight any further than I have already.

MI:3 was disappointing actually. I wasn't looking forward to it hugely but when I got around to seeing it, the whole film just felt really half-arsed. After all that time you'd think it'd be made at least with some energy. No real tension, the stakes didn't seem very high, and there wasn't anything particularly clever or intrieging. Even Phillip Seymour Hoffman was shit.

Johnny Townmouse

As a huge Cronenberg fan I was really holding out for something special with A History of Violence and I ended up finding it laughably bad. Except my laughter was a veil from my sadness and frustration.

For the same reasons Eyes Wide Shut was a great disappointment, though I have begun to see it differently on the third watch. The first time around I thought the projectionist was taking the piss.

But of course, like so many devotees of the original Star Wars films, the subsequent pile of filthy old anal cum that descended onto my head receptors in the recent trilogy was paralysingly bad. When I saw Part 1 I couldn't even get angry. I was frozen to my chair, and tried to square what I had seen with the man who made THX 1138.

Blumf

A Scanner Darkly, all that rotoscoping leading to just no real effect, what was the point? Usually PKD based films are great, even the bad ones (Paycheck) at least have something to them, but ASD just dragged for me.

Shoulders?-Stomach!

It was supposed to bring you into their world, as bleary-eyed paranoid wasters. Yes it does drag at times. It is messy, it is clunky. The film itself has some classic moments that really bring Dick's work to life, and it's a classic example of his more domestic science-fiction. It has some nice individual scenes and scraps of dialogue too. You can't go into the film expecting something linear or blockbustery though.

I came out of it thinking 'Oooh they should get Linklater to do Ubik'. They are making a film of it supposedly.



Ginyard

The Hitchhiker's Guide film. Utter shite.

gatchamandave

I had that recently when I finally got a hold of a dvd of Knightriders.

I had read for years that this was considered by most fans the warmest and most human of George Romero's films, a complete change of pace and style from his zombie films. I had no problem with that since I consider Romero's Dead movies to have been on a downward trend since he started making them again, and wanted so desperately to believe that the old man had indeed once been a major talent.

Yet I didn't find it here. What I found was a two and a half hour movie which had half of a lyrical poem in which the bikers of the time were compared, favourably, with the knights of Camelot and another half that was, well, for half the time just another movie about dirt-bikes.

I could understand Romero's lack of narrative – it's not as if Dawn of the Dead has much in the way of plot, after all, but what I couldn't understand was his shaky grasp of his characters.

No denying Ed Harris is an excellent actor, but why anyone would actually want to follow Billy – the Arthur character – let alone fight for his honour whilst he alternated between sitting on his thrown grinning vacuously, throwing wobblies at the lower classes because they want a bit more say in the way things are run and sharing hippy observations with his in-crowd of mystics and maidens defeated me. Perhaps Romero is trying to suggest that Morgan – a blindingly good performance by Tom Savini here – is actually going to be better at running things than Billy was, but if so it's a rather odd reading of Camelot's politics.

One of the reasons Dawn is a film many return to is because of the interplay between Roger and Peter. Well, Ken Foree and Scott Reiniger are in this movie too, and part of Billy's support staff – yet bizarrely the two of them exchange nary a word with one another. Obviously Romero didn't want to repeat himself, the better to engage his own interest, but it's a weakness in the movie that he never focuses in on any other relationships for long. So when we discover who the Lancelot character is, it comes as a surprise since we haven't seen him speak to the Queen at any stage, let alone profess his forbidden love for her. Pat Tallman drifts into the film at the start, hangs about a bit, then gets dumped at the side of the road with no explanation. One characters relatives pop up half-way through, exchange some conversation with him and his mate - and then disappear after a scene that told us...not very much of anything. The guy doing the announcements during the shows is told that he has a genius for getting the crowd enthusiastic – which is weird since every time he stands in front of a microphone he's slightly less capable than Norman Collier. The Guinevere substitute barely gets a line – a major error in a film built around Arthurian legends.

These things could all be resolved easily with a couple of scenes where characters talk to one another but whilst there should be space for such in a movie that runs 145 minutes, the problem is that every time that there is an opportunity – no, a need – for such Romero sticks in a load of folks in armour riding around on bikes in the dust. Good sources have it that the original cut ran three hours and that those who saw that cut thought it overlong but excellent. It would appear that in cutting Romero chopped a lot of stuff he should have kept and retained too much of his bike footage, such that it becomes repetitive and ultimately a bit dull. It doesn't help that the audio plays up the revving engines and drops out in many of the dialogue scenes, whilst a great soundtrack has been recorded on a lousy system.

Reviewers over the years have claimed that this is a film to return to again and again, and that they gain new insights into the characters and their relationships. Maybe so. Myself, I suspect that in exchanging reviews, theories and interviews with various cast and crew members a lore has built up around the film and what is going on in it, almost befitting to the films origins. Much of what is alleged to be there is there, but in a vestigial form, a thing of inference. Characters appear in later scenes to be following up on plot or character arcs set up in earlier scenes, but those have been chopped so we have to either fill in the blanks just a bit too often, or accept that, as in real life, we have no idea what people around us are talking about and hope that ultimately it will all make sense.

It was a disappointing film – it's nearly great in some parts, but terribly weak in others and, as with Diary of the Dead, occasionally just a bit trite. That television executives and marketing men can cheapen a worthy enterprise was not a great revelation, even in 1981. It suggests to me that had Romero ever gone Hollywood, his decline would have occurred twenty years ago and he would now be in the same "whatever happened to his talent ?" bracket that Tobe Hooper and John Carpenter define.

EOLAN

Quote from: Egyptian Feast on May 19, 2010, 12:37:40 PM
Public Enemies was a huge let-down. It had huge potential, but Christ it was dull. The previous Dillinger films with Laurence Tierney and Warren Oates had their faults, but were infinitely more entertaining. John Milius' Dillinger may have cost more than a hundred times less than Public Enemies, yet it felt much more authentic and convincing. And fun.



HAve to totally agree with this. Public Enemies was a film I thought was right up my street being a sucker for inter war period pieces and gangsters films. But this was beyond dull. Now I am a bit of an old movie fan but about the most exciting bit of the film was when they were showing Clark Gable and Spencer Tracy in the Manhattan Murder Mystery as Dillinger waited in the cinema. The energy in that compared to this reprtitive set-up of Dillinger trapped and fools a cop to escape was astounding.

SavageHedgehog

Quote from: Barberism on May 19, 2010, 11:37:42 AM
I thought King Arthur (2004) was ok. But couldn't get past the fact they did a big budget version of King Arthur with all of the mythology taken out.

What's more it was the second time in a decade that had been done. And the first one hadn't been received well.

Jemble Fred

What was the one before? First Knight? I couldn't bare to watch that.

SavageHedgehog

Yep. I sort of liked it actually!

Jemble Fred

Ah. Well I've seen bits, and know the gist – surely it's an extremely different Arthur though, isn't it? Pure Hollywood romance devoid of any reality, rather than the very specifically stated "historically accurate" back-to-basics high-octane stuff of the other movie.

Course, the latter missed the target hugely in its aim to make an entertaining "historically accurate" movie, in exactly the same way as Robin Hood. Both films are perfect for this thread, anyway – they offered so much, and made plenty of promises, but ended up coming across like very badly bungled films, with all the hallmarks of constant studio interruption and Hollywoodisation throughout production. Sometimes I kept expecting to see Russell Crowe flicking through the script to see what happens next.

SavageHedgehog

The two movies are quite different in their approach, but to me both seemed to be trying to demythologise the story.

Artemis

Controversial, and bit weird because in many ways I really like it, but Back To The Future 3 let me down a bit. The first one was, and still is, the best time-travel movie ever made, and rightly regarded by many as a genuinely classic movie. The second managed to weave it's way into the first brilliantly and was creative, clever, imaginative and pioneering. The third lost something; there was a magic to the first two that was often spell-binding. You felt like you were watching something never seen and never attempted before, and in many ways you were. The third felt more like a love-in, more self-regarding and pointless than the first two. Oh sure, you get 'You're my, you're my [mom]', Biff covered in manure and so on, but it had been done before - twice. I just felt like they'd run out of juice so they did as many in-jokes as they could.

If I remember rightly, parts two and three were filmed back to back, so I'm not sure if that made any difference, but yes. My submission: Back To The Future 3.

Treguard of Dunshelm

Aeon Flux. The original cartoon is startling, original and darkly witty, the film is a mish-mash of overused action movie cliches that pays scant regard to the source material.

Jemble Fred

The only thing I felt BTTF3 really lacked was the added complication of it being set so close to our time, and the pleasure of presenting the 50s as this alien world. Taking the action to the Old West was a bit more.. distancing, and made it a bit more of a genre piece. Still love it, though. Apart from the pervy little boy wanting a wee, obviously.

Claude the Racecar Driving Rockstar Super Sleuth

Death Proof. All the hype building up to Grindhouse said that, unlike their cheap scuzzy inspiration, this would be a pair of movies that actually lived up to the promise of the posters. I'd enjoyed Kill Bill for the most part, so I sat down for Tarantino's effort expecting a gleeful trashfest of grinding gears and burning rubber. What I got instead was a bunch of unpleasant arseholes yakking on and on and on about nothing. One short scene of carnage later, they're replaced with a whole new set of arseholes and the whole thing starts all over again.

Apparently it's, like, totally feminist because they're all women having a good time or something. And if they have to leave one of their number at the mercy of a rapist hillbilly in order to get their kicks, well never mind, eh?

At least now I know where the 'Grind' part of the title came from. It stands for grinding tedium.

And the 'House' stands for 'shithouse!' Am I right?

Spoiler alert
You're not wrong!
[close]

Subtle Mocking

Spiderman 3. It's amazing how one terrifically shit scene can do it's best to nearly destroy any credibility a franchise has. And that's just one scene, I haven't mentioned the rest of the film.

What is it with third films in series and being so bad? Is there some sort of curse on film-makers that makes them irreparably damage a franchise or is it just a signal of how much they couldn't give a toss?
Think about it, Godfather 3, Alien 3, Spiderman 3, Matrix Revolutions, Shrek 3...

Chutney

The Black Dahlia

Incredible book, and for years I'd been imagining what a film version might be like.  To be honest it always felt like a 12 part miniseries would be the only way to truly do it justice, but then I heard tell that David Fincher was actually lining up a cinematic version.

Very good, thought I - would have been my number one choice to helm the thing, so I just waited patiently.  And waited.  And waited.

And then, having forgotten it, a Brian de Palma version appeared. And it was shite, I mean really shite.  Too bad to go into detail of exactly what was wrong with it, but if you've read the book you'll be able to imagine the scope for getting this wrong, and de Palma nailed that one.  Scarlett Johannsen's ability to wear a tight 50s sweater being its only redeeming feature.

A massively wasted opportunity.

Johnny Townmouse

Quote from: Chutney on May 19, 2010, 04:10:38 PM
The Black Dahlia
And then, having forgotten it, a Brian de Palma version appeared. And it was shite, I mean really shite. 
A massively wasted opportunity.

But De Palma is such a fucking dreadful director. I can just about stand Carrie, and Blow Out is a good film despite him I would imagine, but out of all the brat-pack, cokehead, New Hollywood directors, De Palma was always the worst. For me he has an incredible legacy of bad film-making, including Scarface, The Untouchables, Casualties of War and Carlito's Way. I know this is subjective, and I have tried to like him because I truly think that Blow Out shows great promise. But he feels far too uncinematic to me, and he seems to make even very good actors sound hammy and unconvincing.

And I put the success of Mission Impossible down to Robert Towne's revised script.

Redacted is in my top five worst films of all time. Raising Cain isn't, but perhaps should be.

gatchamandave

Quote from: Claude the Racecar Driving Rockstar Super Sleuth on May 19, 2010, 04:04:11 PM
Death Proof. All the hype building up to Grindhouse said that, unlike their cheap scuzzy inspiration, this would be a pair of movies that actually lived up to the promise of the posters. I'd enjoyed Kill Bill for the most part, so I sat down for Tarantino's effort expecting a gleeful trashfest of grinding gears and burning rubber. What I got instead was a bunch of unpleasant arseholes yakking on and on and on about nothing. One short scene of carnage later, they're replaced with a whole new set of arseholes and the whole thing starts all over again.

Apparently it's, like, totally feminist because they're all women having a good time or something. And if they have to leave one of their number at the mercy of a rapist hillbilly in order to get their kicks, well never mind, eh?

At least now I know where the 'Grind' part of the title came from. It stands for grinding tedium.


Good choice. Again my hopes weren't high, but I expected it to be at the very least entertaining but, as you say, absolutely every character in the film is thoroughly unpleasant and one cares neither for the girls or for "Stuntman Mike ". Apparently the dvd of Planet Terror outsells Deathproof by about 3:1, and I must say I'm not surprised.

Quote from: Subtle Mocking on May 19, 2010, 04:09:44 PM
Spiderman 3. It's amazing how one terrifically shit scene can do it's best to nearly destroy any credibility a franchise has. And that's just one scene, I haven't mentioned the rest of the film.


Only the one scene - with so many to choose from ? Which one did it for you ?



Ginyard

Quote from: Chutney on May 19, 2010, 04:10:38 PM
The Black Dahlia

Incredible book, and for years I'd been imagining what a film version might be like. 

That's so often a problem when a decent novel is translated to the screen, one that you have your own vivid ideas about. I read Starter for 10 a few weeks back, which I thought was a great yarn, then sat down to watch the film not long after, pleased that it appeared to have impressed many critics. I thought it was bloody awful and couldn't quite worked out what they'd seen that made them fawn so much. It had none of the heart of the book and the feisty, passionate scottish goth girl had been sort of dumbed down into this lanky english drip. Crap.

Subtle Mocking

Quote from: gatchamandave on May 19, 2010, 04:27:36 PM
Only the one scene - with so many to choose from ? Which one did it for you ?

It was a tough one, believe me. I went with the strutting scene. I'm not even going to post it here, I wouldn't want to see the same reaction I saw that day at the cinema.

the midnight watch baboon

Quote from: Chutney on May 19, 2010, 04:10:38 PM
The Black Dahlia

Incredible book, and for years I'd been imagining what a film version might be like.  To be honest it always felt like a 12 part miniseries would be the only way to truly do it justice, but then I heard tell that David Fincher was actually lining up a cinematic version.

Very good, thought I - would have been my number one choice to helm the thing, so I just waited patiently.  And waited.  And waited.

And then, having forgotten it, a Brian de Palma version appeared. And it was shite, I mean really shite.  Too bad to go into detail of exactly what was wrong with it, but if you've read the book you'll be able to imagine the scope for getting this wrong, and de Palma nailed that one.  Scarlett Johannsen's ability to wear a tight 50s sweater being its only redeeming feature.

A massively wasted opportunity.
The David Fincher version was going to be in black and white, James Ellroy has said in interviews, and Fincher would've been his choice too. Would have been a mouth-watering companion piece to Zodiac, which didn't blow me away at the cinema but really pulled me in on a second viewing at home.

Chutney

Quote from: the midnight watch baboon on May 19, 2010, 04:32:56 PM
The David Fincher version was going to be in black and white, James Ellroy has said in interviews, and Fincher would've been his choice too. Would have been a mouth-watering companion piece to Zodiac, which didn't blow me away at the cinema but really pulled me in on a second viewing at home.

Yes - black and white - that rings a bell.  And it was another match up to my imagined version of the film.

All I needed was James Woods to play Russ Millard, and the hat-trick would have been there, but that's another story...

Artemis

I'd say The Exorcist as well. I didn't see it at the cinema admittedly, and I watched it at home with the lights on and the radio on in the background in case I grew scared beyond my ability to cope, but even so I don't think the movie was remotely scary really, and actually pretty funny in places. A let down? Well ok, maybe not for me - I didn't want to be scared, but I did want it to live up to it's hype more, like Reservoir Dogs. Now there's a great movie.