18. Iron Man 2

Speaking of a few great scenes surrounded by predictable fluff…

Look, Robert Downey, Jr. is a national treasure. Every line read he does during this movie is pitch perfect, the sort of world-weary sardonic take that’s effortless for him but forced by everyone else.

But sometimes the rest of the movie doesn’t hold up around him, so much so that even the director, Jon Favreau, was forced to admit it in interviews later. Of course, that’s not really his fault.  Marvel clearly wanted to use this movie as leverage for their whole Avengers franchise, and a good deal of the movie is pointless b-story as a result: Nick Fury and the Black Widow try to convince him to join the Avengers for a while, then he talks to the agent who represents them for a while. It has nothing to do with plot even a little, and if this was a serialized TV show, some of what they were saying would be interesting as we anticipated a developing storyline. But this is a movie, not a TV show, and when I leave the theater, I don’t want to say “well, that was a little dull, but that other movie they kept referencing that’ll be out two years from now should be amazing!”

Some superhero movies are better the second time around, when the hero’s themes can be more fully explored: Superman II, The Dark Knight, Spider-Man 2, X-Men 2, etc. And Iron Man is the perfect candidate for a darker, more introspective film – he has father issues, dependency issues, self-absorption issues, not to mention alcoholism. Tony Stark is an intriguing, complex, character who can be unwrapped over time, not a blank metaphor like Superman or Batman. And it seemed that the movie that Favreau wanted to make was more about that. But this script seemed like a bunch of studio executives all jamming their vision into one movie – Scarlett Johansson fighting people! An Iron Man suit that comes in a suitcase! Robots soldiers with rocket launchers! Sam Rockwell acting crazy! Micky Rourke acting crazy! – rather than being its own thing. Sometimes we don’t just want a collection of cool ideas and flashy visuals and explosions in our summer movies. Sometimes we want a real movie.

19. The Runaways

Speaking of being perceived a terrible actress…

Kristen Stewart is in this movie. And she’s very good in it, as shocking as that may be to some people. Not that it matters. Despite all of the actors’ best efforts, this movie goes completely off the rails long before we get to the third act.

The Runaways is the story of Joan Jett’s first band, featuring a coquettish young singer named Cherie Currie, played by Dakota Fanning, and ruled over by a domineering, self-absorbed manager named Kim Fowley (Michael Shannon).

The movie hits all the notes you think. Jett and Currie are lonely, disconnected teens with a love of music but no real training. They’re assembled into a band together by Fowley, who sees money to be made in a rough-edged punk band with underage sex appeal. They start to hit it big, and then – shockingly – things start happening too fast for all of them!

Drugs! Drinking! Fights! Girl-on-girl sexual tension! Things are spiraling out of control! Who could possibly have seen this coming?

The movie falls into all the same band-movie tropes. The slow descent into a hazy, strung-out, drug-obsessed life happens with the same slow, somber beats you’d expect, until the characters are simply stumbling unhappily from scene to scene.  For most of the film, the only time any life is injected into the film is when Shannon barrels onto the screen, waving his arms and gleefully chewing the scenery.  

Stewart, Shannon and Fanning are all excellent in the film – Shannon in particular is fantastic – but I’m most struck by Fanning’s performance in the film, though not for the right reasons. The Runaways focuses heavily on the sexualization of Cherie Currie, a petite 15-year-old girl, who Fowley dresses in the most skimpy of lingerie and constantly pushes her to act as lewdly as possible. It’s a sad example to see on film, but the part is played by Fanning, who was only fifteen herself when she played the role. Scenes featuring her acting lasciviously are stretched out, and the camera lingers over her young form. The line between portraying underage sexuality and taking part in it blurs, and seems to disappear entirely. In many ways, it’s a more disturbing role than her more famous one in Hounddog.

Instead of watching the story of Joan Jett’s rise to rock stardom, instead the film slowly collapses into an aimless exercise in Rock Bio 101. We end up with a few great scenes surrounded by a pile of predictable fluff.

20. Machete

Speaking of mediocre movies that take themselves too seriously…

Machete is not supposed to be a good movie. I understand that. I love that. I went to see it because of that. And for the first twenty minutes, I thought that Robert Rodriguez understood that as well.

But it doesn’t seem to have quite sunk in with him that when you make a bad, nonsensical popcorn movie, you can’t also wrap in a tremendously preachy message and expect it to play as anything other than a propaganda movie. And that’s what it felt like.

That’s not to say that the particularly exploitative moments weren’t occasionally perfectly assembled. There’s a moment where Machete swings through a plate glass window using the intestines of a still-living villain in the floor above. It’s so shockingly, delightfully trashy that you can’t help but feel you’ve already gotten your money’s worth. And Danny Trejo is pitch-perfect as the blank-faced mercenary hell-bent on a revenge mission. He plays it absolutely straight, but just in case you didn’t think he was in on the joke, here he is summing up the plot of the movie for a Lipton ad.

Yet for some reason, Machete is saddled with an incredibly preachy pro-immigration (or, more accurately, anti-anti-immigration) so insultingly low-minded it makes Lindsay Lohan’s cameo as a amateur porn star seem classy. I would say that I generally agree with Rodriguez’s stance in theory, though after the movie I would say I’m much more in favor of building a border wall, so long as it’s a wall between Rodriguez and his computer.

By the way, I know that Jessica Alba is generally perceived as a terrible actress by the movie-going public, but I have to say, after watching this movie, I think she is much worse than people give her credit for.



21. Robin Hood

Speaking of losing all the fun…

Robin Hood is one of the best heroes in both literary and cinema history. He’s the prototypical hero-outlaw, the one in whose mold all antiheroes are created and the character they’re measured against. But while most heroes seem tortured and have to spend most of their time glowering and stroking their lantern jaws, he seems to being having quite a lot of fun.

So anytime someone’s going to make a film about Robin Hood, I’m going to be there. Particularly if it’s someone as ideally suited to the task as my old boss, Ridley Scott.

But it seems like the whole movie was created after the world’s worst pitch meeting.

“You know how Robin Hood’s an archer? What if he used a sword for most of the movie, instead? Archery’s so dull.”

“I like it. But here’s an  idea: what if he didn’t spend a lot of time fighting at all?”

“What could he do instead?”

“Well, he could farm. And then maybe he could just hang around a dilapidated village when he wasn’t farming.”

“What, no Sherwood forest?”

“Why bother? He could just live in a small hold and have arguments with the owners for a while.”

“What about the Merry Men?”

“Oh, my gosh, I forgot.”

“Oh, they’re always having adventures. It’s awful. Can we get rid of them?”

“Well, do we need to have Merry Men? We could just have a few dour fellows who sleep in a shed outside the hold?”

“What would they do?”

“Who cares? We’d only check in on them occasionally.”

“Well, we’d need something else to fill up the movie, then.”

“Couldn’t they rob from the rich and give to the poor?”

“I’d rather we didn’t. Do we have to?”

“I think we do. But maybe they could do it real quick, just once, so that no one could accuse us of taking it out entirely. And that would still leave a lot of time to focus on something… duller.”

“Like what?”

“How about inner government workings only tangentially related to the plot?”

“I’m in shock. That’s perfect. I can’t believe we didn’t think of it earlier.”

“I like this guy. This guy’s on fire.”

“Definitely. We’ve hit it right on the head.  All right, keep it rolling. What else?”

“We, could we introduce a lot of characters we don’t care about, then abandon them for long stretches?”

“Could we? It’s like you’re reading my mind here.”

“And maybe… oh, no, I don’t want to say it.”

“No, go ahead. We’re really moving here.”

“What if Robin Hood had a dark childhood?”

“Oh my God. I love it. With flashbacks?”

“Absolutely. Constant flashbacks.”

“And maybe a hanging, portentous sense of unrealized destiny.”

“Just to keep things from getting too fun.”

“This is fantastic. All we have to do now is try to make Maid Marian dingy and unlikable.”

“Well, we have Cate Blanchett cast. She’s a good actress. What if she fights against the script and tries to rescue her character?”

“That’s the risk we have to take. Are we set?”

“Yes, I think we’ve got it.  No, no, wait! I’ve got something! The best possible ending.”

“Fantastic! Let’s have it.”

“At the end of the movie, - just for a quick second - we’ll see all the characters in Sherwood Forest, hanging out and being the fun, exciting characters they originally were!”

“What? Why?”

“To thoroughly depress the audience as they realize that this was the movie we could have made, instead of the one we did.”

“Oh. My. God. You’ve done it. This is perfect. Have we got all that?”

“Just finishing up some terse dialogue and… looks like the shooting script is ready to go.”

“This movie is going to be hugely disappointing. I couldn’t be more excited.”

“Wait ‘til they walk out of the theater, realizing that this is the same team that made Gladiator!”

“I know! It’s going to be awful for them.”

“I think we can all agree that this is going to be a decidedly mediocre movie that takes itself way too seriously. Everybody gets the rest of the day off.”

“Great work today, people. Just fabulous.”



22. Alice In Wonderland

Speaking of muddled, boring madness…

There’s a lot to like about Tim Burton’s Alice In Wonderland. Say what you will about Burton, the man’s a visionary, and one of the few filmmakers working today whose works truly double as actual pieces of art. If you were to give me a choice of filmmakers to re-imagine Lewis Carroll’s playful children’s book, Burton would’ve been right at the top.

But sometimes Burton gets so tied up in whimsy, in quirk, in invention, that he misses the big picture. So instead of the cohesive, imaginative storytelling that marks his best work (Edward Scissorhands, Big Fish, The Nightmare Before Christmas, etc.), we get a swiftly disintegrating film that never seems to quite rise from being a collection of clever new ideas. While I enjoyed much of the invention – particularly the concept of the Jabberwocky poem being an unfulfilled prophesy – I left the theater feeling unfulfilled.

Still, it’s not until the end of the film, when Alice’s quest dissolves into poorly-staged massive battle against a dull gray sky, that the wheels fully come off. A less than fearsome Jabberwocky appears, and Mia Wasikowska battles it in a somewhat half-hearted manner. I'm not saying they skimped on the weapons training, but at no point did I say to myself, "boy, that vorpal sword really is going snicker-snack!" The CGI creatures run aimlessly across a bare battlefield in poorly-visualized 3D, as the story fumbles around for a conclusion, and I’m left staring blankly at the screen, wondering where all the fun went.