bad company movie reviews

Bad Company (2002)

Bad Company is an Everything Picture. It’s got action, comedy, and even a love interest. It’s got hip-hop Chris Rock, white-bread Anthony Hopkins, and window-dressing Garcelle Beauvais-Nilon. It’s an odd-couple buddy picture, a fish-out-of-water comedy, a shoot-em-up spy caper. It’s this summer’s would-be Rush Hour and Men in Black (though the original and returning Men in Black might beg to differ). Oh yes, and it’s topical: For the second weekend in a row (following The Sum of All Fears ), terrorists smuggle a nuclear device into a major American city and try to blow it up.

Artistic/Entertainment Value

Moral/spiritual value, age appropriateness, mpaa rating, caveat spectator.

Bad Company wants to be everything for everybody, and, while it’s not a lot of anything for anybody, it manages to be just enough of this and that not to be a total waste of time. Fitfully funny but never exciting or engaging, modestly entertaining but excessively dimwitted, and in the end just too darn long, Bad Company is, in a word, relentlessly average. Chris Rock’s one-liners and Anthony Hopkins’s dialed-back delivery are the reasons to see it, but the bad guys, the plot, and the action are dead on arrival.

The first hour works quite a bit better than the second hour, in part because there is a second hour. The setup: When CIA agent Kevin Pope (Rock) is murdered in the middle of an important undercover operation involving the black-market sale of a miniature thermonuclear device, Pope’s CIA mentor Gaylord Oakes (Hopkins) must convince the sellers that Pope (or rather his undercover persona) is still alive. To do this, Oakes must turn to — you guessed it — Pope’s long-lost twin brother.

Enter Jake Hayes (Rock), a fast-talking chess hustler and small-time ticket scalper trying to eke out a living that will allow him to marry his girlfriend Julie (Kerry Washington). "You know, poor people do get married," Jake plaintively tells Julie, and we realize with mild surprise that he actually loves her and wants to marry her — that he’s not just a walking libido in the way that, for example, Chris Tucker is in the Rush Hour movies.

Later in the film, Jake’s love for Julie is put to the test when his dead brother’s gorgeous girlfriend (Beauvais-Nilon), mistaking Jake for her boyfriend, practically falls into his lap, and soon afterward demonstrates a determined interest in that portion of his anatomy. This all-out temptation only makes Jake realize, not without wincing regret, what Julie really means to him: "I didn’t know till two minutes ago just how much I loved you," he babbles to her answering machine two minutes after discovering Beauvais-Nilon in his shower. In a movie of this sort, bits like this almost qualify as sweet. It hardly even matters that Jake later follows up a "wish" that comes true by quipping "I wish for Jennifer Lopez naked," since we know he doesn’t mean it. After all, he already turned down Garcelle Beauvais-Nilon naked.

In any case, Jake needs money in order to marry Julie, and the CIA needs Jake to impersonate Kevin. After an amusing negotiation scene (long since spoiled in the trailers), Jake begins a nine-day induction into CIA life that is equal parts torture and rapture. Like Eddie Murphy being swept up into Dan Ackroyd’s world in Trading Places , Jake is staggered by his lavish new surroundings ("So, if I paid taxes — this is where the money would go!"), but finds the discipline almost more than he can bear.

These scenes pay off in some funny ways, though Oakes and company seem to spend all their time teaching Jake skills (such as speaking Czech and commenting knowledgeably on wine and vodka) that turn out to play no role whatsoever in his mission. Meanwhile, Jake’s one skill that does turn out to play a crucial role in the climactic scene is never hinted at beforehand, though it would have been easy to do so and would have given the climax some modicum of interest.

Despite his class training, Rock makes virtually no effort to modify Jake’s behavior when he’s meant to be impersonating Kevin; yet no one realizes he’s an imposter. (Only Kevin’s girlfriend spots the deception — but after a brief attempt to kiss Jake, not from his behavior.) In one scene, Jake chats up a wealthy neighbor of Kevin’s who invites him to appraise her latest acquisition; Jake tries to be smooth in admiring what turns out to be a vase, but when she tells him what she paid for it, he blurts disbelievingly, "$150,000?! Good Lord, what you gonna put in it, cocaine?"

Like his raw trainee, Oakes is more decent than you might expect. He wants to deal squarely with Jake, but his superiors insist Jake be kept in the dark about the dangers of the mission — something Oakes admits frankly was a mistake. In the end, his appeal to Jake is not financial, but moral: "This may sound corny, but I truly believe that this is bigger than either of us." Jake doesn’t immediately respond to this, but later on there’s a showcase moment in which Jake elaborately dresses down Oakes’s superior, challenging him, "Did it ever occur to you that I might be doing this because it’s the right thing?"

Some critics have complained about the lack of chemistry between Hopkins and Rock. For me, the lack of chemistry is precisely what I like about their relationship. They don’t have become buddies in the penultimate reel in order to work together to save the world. A kind of grudging affection grows between them, but nothing remotely like a real friendship. That’s as it should be. Oakes’s final line to Jake sums up their relationship perfectly.

Hopkins and Rock carry the film as far as they can, but it’s not far enough. In the end this story comes down to a race against a digital countdown on a bomb, and that’s a tired way even to open an action movie, let alone to end one. The gunfights and car chases are utterly devoid of interest, and in the whole film I can recall only one stunt (involving a hotel laundry chute) of any distinction whatsoever.

Bad Company could have been a better action story. All it needed was better action, and a better story.

P.S. Why does the movie open with a religious procession, and stage a major firefight in an abandoned monastery? Your guess is as good as mine.

I Spy (2002)

Wilson, a capable comic force in his own right, gets laughs too, but for the most part he’s content to play the laid-back straight man setting up Murphy’s punchlines. There’s an early scene in which, discussing their working relationship, Wilson uses a Harlem Globetrotters analogy to argue that he, the professional spy, should be team leader Meadowlark Lemon, and Murphy, a boxing champ, should be Fred "Curly" Neal, Meadowlark’s sidekick. Murphy, of course, ridicules this suggestion; and, whatever the ultimate relationship of their characters, which of the actors is Meadowlark and which is Curly is never in dispute.

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"Bad Company" is a thriller of extravagant complexity, a thinking man's Grisham film. It is about smart, ruthless people who once worked for the CIA and now engage in free-lance espionage. They are greedy, relentless and willing to kill, and of course they are expensively dressed and housed; these are the kinds of people who touch themselves as if afraid of leaving prints.

As the movie opens, a man named Nelson Crowe ( Laurence Fishburne ) is being interviewed for a job in the Grimes Organization, which specializes in industrial dirty tricks. He is hired by Margaret Wells ( Ellen Barkin ), the second in command, who takes him in to her boss, Vic Grimes ( Frank Langella ). All of these people hold themselves with studied casualness, and talk in elegant, mannered understatement: There is the implication in many crime movies that the villains have been to finishing schools the rest of us couldn't afford.

The movie succeeds in fascinating us simply with its manner and decor, before much of the plot has been revealed - and, believe me, there is a lot of plot to reveal. The movie was directed by Damien Harris from the first original screenplay written by Ross Thomas , the superb crime novelist, and it is a movie that feels written: The dialogue has a sleek cruelty, and the supporting characters have a quirkiness that you don't find in movies that were knitted in screenwriting class.

Langella and Barkin go to visit a man named Walter Curl, played by the nervous Spaulding Grey, who spends much of the movie sucking on his handkerchief. He fears a $25 million fine because his corporation has poisoned some kids with toxic waste. Wells tells him that for 4 percent of that - $1 million - she can bribe a state judge and affect the outcome of the trial. Their client is uncertain. "Look at us!" Langella says. "Do we look like the kind of people who want to go to prison?" (He is always assuring people in this way; it's a running joke.) Langella is a smooth, polished actor who implies wit without revealing it, but listen to the way he says: "Before you attempt to suborn a superior court judge, you make sure he has his hand out. Way out. Way out to here." The judge is played by David Ogden Stiers , as a man who likes to gamble and owes money to card players and horse racing bookies. There is a nice supporting role for his mistress ( Gia Carides ), who watches as he is bribed, and who turns out to like him more, and be smarter, than we think. Meanwhile, the Barkin character has suggested to Fishburne that together they could knock off poor Grimes and take over the organization themselves.

But that is only one of many meanwhiles in Thomas's labyrinthine script. There are many other surprises, none of which I will reveal, because watching this movie is like seeing an onion unpeeled: Each level seems complete and whole, until you find another underneath. And the Thomas dialogue speeds it all along, with scenes like the one where the mistress learns how to arm a gun, or when Langella explains about fly fishing.

I found myself fascinated by the decor. The movie is set in Seattle and was shot largely in Vancouver, and the production notes mention the architect Tadao Ando, whose buildings and style influence the interiors. The production designer, Andrew McAlpine, makes spaces which add to the characters: The Fishburne character, for example, lives in a house of deep reds and blues, where except for the kitchen there is no place to sit down except on an exercise machine.

The photographer, Jack N. Green , has shot this world in a seductive way. It is so expensive, so closed-in, so decadent, so witty, that it encourages the actors in their cool, mannered behavior. Everybody poses. They are formal. Mannered. Barkin has sex with both men, but mostly keeps her clothes on. There are times when these characters would rather keep their cool than stay alive.

The plot moves like clockwork, surprising us, then surprising us again, but I liked "Bad Company" more for its style, look and feel. That's what will stay. Looking carefully at this movie is like savoring the very best that craft can accomplish on a big budget in modern Hollywood. Every shot is loaded; the movie makes its statement about this world, not with what is said, but with how and where it is said. And how people look when they are saying it. The movie's an example of Possessoporn, in which the audience's lust is stirred not by how the characters look but by what they possess.

Roger Ebert

Roger Ebert was the film critic of the Chicago Sun-Times from 1967 until his death in 2013. In 1975, he won the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished criticism.

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Bad company, common sense media reviewers.

Nuclear-bomb-in-NYC plot leaves sour aftertaste.

A Lot or a Little?

What you will—and won't—find in this movie.

A lot of violence, many characters killed.

Non-graphic, character resists temptation to be un

Strong language for a PG-13.

Some drug humor.

Parents need to know that this movie has a great deal of violence with characters, including a terrified young woman, in frequent peril. They use strong language, and there's some drug humor. Hayes says that if his girlfriend is pregnant, he will marry her, but if she's not, he's not in a hurry. Hayes has…

Violence & Scariness

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Sex, Romance & Nudity

Non-graphic, character resists temptation to be unfaithful.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Sex, Romance & Nudity in your kid's entertainment guide.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Language in your kid's entertainment guide.

Drinking, Drugs & Smoking

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Parents Need to Know

Parents need to know that this movie has a great deal of violence with characters, including a terrified young woman, in frequent peril. They use strong language, and there's some drug humor. Hayes says that if his girlfriend is pregnant, he will marry her, but if she's not, he's not in a hurry. Hayes has the opportunity to have sex with a gorgeous woman. He jokes about it, but remains faithful to his girlfriend. Rock's mugging is occasionally uncomfortably reminiscent of the racist stereotypes perpetuated by early movie stars like Step'n Fetchit. To stay in the loop on more movies like this, you can sign up for weekly Family Movie Night emails .

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What's the Story?

In BAD COMPANY, Chris Rock plays Jake Hayes, a streetwise hustler who finds out that not only did he have an identical twin brother who was adopted while he was shuttled to foster homes, but that his brother was a brilliant, sophisticated spy, and that he was killed just as a crucial future-of-the-world-depends-in-it deal was about to be concluded. His brother's partner, Gaylord Oakes (Anthony Hopkins), a spy so cool that he chews gum while he shoots people, recruits Hayes to take his brother's place. Oakes has nine days to train Hayes and is instructed by his supervisor not to tell him that he may be killed.

Is It Any Good?

This generic summer popcorn movie would be instantly forgettable if not for the sour aftertaste left by its climax, with a nuclear bomb set to explode in New York City's Grand Central Station. We are just not ready for a scene like that, and it would not be so bad if we never were again.

Rock is not an actor. He can barely get through the part of Hayes, which is written around his strengths, and his brief attempt to play the spy brother is painful to watch. Every so often, the script lets him go into one of his stand-up rants and his charm and wit come alive. Hopkins, of course, is a magnificent actor, and he does his best to create a real character out of the cardboard script.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about the fact that this film, which includes a plot to set off a nuclear bomb in NYC, was released in 2002, a year after 9/11. Do you think the timing was just a case of the film already being in production and too late to modify, or do you think filmmakers might have wanted to try to capitalize on the national attention to terror plots? What responsibilities do you think filmmakers have when it comes to creating films with stories similar to real-life tragic events?

Movie Details

• In theaters : June 7, 2002
• On DVD or streaming : November 12, 2002
• Cast : Anthony Hopkins , Chris Rock , Kerry Washington
• Director : Joel Schumacher
• Inclusion Information : Black actors, Female actors
• Studio : Touchstone Pictures
• Genre : Action/Adventure
• Run time : 117 minutes
• MPAA rating : PG-13
• MPAA explanation : intense sequences of violent action, some sensuality and language.
• Last updated : October 1, 2022

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Beverly Hills Cop

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Prague, the Czech Republic. After a CIA operation to buy a nuclear suitcase bomb goes badly wrong, high-flying clandestine operative Kevin Pope (Rock) is killed in a shootout. With just days to go before the sale, veteran CIA agent Gaylord Oakes (Hopkins) must find a replacement who looks, acts and talks like Pope .

As luck would have it, Pope has a twin brother , Jake Hayes (Rock again). Only problem is that Hayes isn't exactly agency material . In fact, he's the kind of streetwise hustler who thinks CIA stands for "crack is in my ass".

With its high concept premise - shove two completely different actors together and see what happens - this latest movie from producer Jerry Bruckheimer and director Joel Schumacher delivers exactly what it promises .

Motormouth Rock gets to show off his trademark comedy skills (every ten minutes or so, the script pauses to give him a chance to switch into stand-up-routine mode), while Hopkins plays the sceptical CIA man with all the seriousness of Shakespearean tragedy.

With little chemistry between the two stars , a ridiculous plot about a suitcase bomb in New York's Grand Central Station, and a bunch of villains who are about as nasty as a group of school bullies , "Bad Company" really struggles to get much mileage out of the material .

While Rock gives his usual sub-Eddie Murphy routine, Hopkins looks like he thought he was signing up for a different movie .

We know Sir Anthony can play intellectual cannibals to perfection, but CIA agents seem to be out of his grasp ... especially when the role involves running through the streets of New York in search of a bomb.

Looking like some portly reject from The Sweeney, you can't help wishing that the fate of the free world laid on the shoulders of a much younger body.

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Bad Company Review

19 Jul 2002

116 minutes

Bad Company

It is no surprise that Bad Company started life as a movie project in the '80s. Throwing together many elements of the high-concept filmmaking that defined that decade - the fish-out-of-water scenario, the mismatched partners schtick - the only thing missing is a Harold Faltermeyer score. Unfortunately, what this comedy-action-thriller fails to do in any way is add any new licks to the old formulas and scenarios. If Beverly Hills Cop is the benchmark, then this falls a long way short.

Not originally envisaged as a summer release - its terrorist-attack-on-New-York finale has seen it delayed - Bad Company is subsequently a lower-key effort compared to recent Bruckheimer blockbusters.

The set-up is small-scale, the look is muted compared to the filter-fests of Michael Bay and Tony Scott, and the competent, bog-standard action set-pieces - a shoot-out in a practically deserted hotel, a car chase through high grass - swap huge explosions for more down-to-earth thrills. The movie is better in its first half, as Jake is inducted into the ways of the CIA with Rock given the space to freeform some funny comedic riffs into the formulaic mix. Yet when the hackneyed plot machinations kick in - the rent-a-villains (including a wasted Stormare) lack colour and personality - Rock gets subsumed in standard thriller staples and can do little to up the fun quotient.

Hopkins adds well-worn gravitas to his underwritten CIA operative without ever giving the feeling he is trying particularly hard. That there is something not quite clicking in the chemistry between the two stars is symptomatic of the film itself - Schumacher never achieves the right tone between the comedy and action. The result is that all-too-familiar beast: average Saturday night fare devoid of any kind of surprise or invention.

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Bad Company

• Action/Adventure , Comedy

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• Anthony Hopkins, Chris Rock, Gabriel Macht

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Any film that puts “bad” in its title is asking for trouble from critics. Bad Company , a dumbed-down spy thriller following the high-testosterone, low-plausibility formula of producer Jerry Bruckheimer, deserves whatever zingers it gets. Not that young fans of adrenalized action will care what the critics think.

Undercover CIA operatives led by agent Oakes (Hopkins) are trying to buy a bomb on the black market, in part to sting the Russian dealer, in part to keep it out of the hands of rival bidders determined to nuke Manhattan. A crucial agent dies, forcing the CIA to recruit his streetwise twin, Jake (Rock), to complete the deal. The jive-talking hustler is out of his element, but gets trained just in time for the action to kick into high gear and the body count—with several people shot at point-blank range—to push the bounds of the PG-13 rating. Considerable violence is joined by more than 60 profanities or obscenities (including 17 s-words and one f-word), as well as crass sexual remarks.

The movie does try to make some positive statements about self-sacrifice, staying in school and the institution of marriage. In one scene, Jake walks in on a showering beauty who, thinking he is his brother, wants to get frisky. He finds her attractive, yet resists her advances because his heart belongs to a girl he hopes to marry. That’s great. But the film takes every opportunity to titillate the audience by showing the temptress in skimpy lingerie, and by zooming in on her foot as it massages Jake’s crotch.

Ridiculous action and dialogue is one thing, but teens can do without the barrage of violence, language and other moral miscues. Heed the words of 1 Corinthians 15:33. Don’t let Bad Company corrupt good character.

Bob Smithouser

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Bad Company Parent Guide

Anthony Hopkins plays an impassive, experienced CIA agent, Gaylord Oakes, whose up to his neck in an arms bid for a nuclear bomb when a competitive party kills his partner, Kevin Pope (Chris Rock).

Release date June 6, 2002

Run Time: 116 minutes

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The guide to our grades, parent movie review by kerry bennett.

I don’t know what was more painful, watching Anthony Hopkins play a straight guy in the comedy scenes or Chris Rock trying to get serious for the dramatic ones. Either way Bad Company waffles between gags and gunfire in an odd attempt to mix fish-out-of-water humor with a nuclear bomb that’s about to explode.

Hopkins plays an impassive, experienced CIA agent, Gaylord Oakes, whose up to his neck in an arms bid for a nuclear bomb when a competitive party kills his partner, Kevin Pope (Rock). Determined to keep the deal from falling through, CIA agents snag Pope’s ticket scalping twin from the streets of New Jersey and attempt to press him into service. But Jake Haynes (Rock) is a far cry from his polished and well-educated brother. With only nine days to work their magic, Agents Seale (Gabriel Macht), Swanson (Brooke Smith) and Carew (Daniel Sunjata) step in to help Oakes transform the sharp-witted, street punk into an urbane, antiquities dealer.

Bad Company , billed as a comedy, fires off more rounds of ammo than punch lines between the fighting factions in this arms race. Hand-to-hand combat, knife wielding assassins, suicidal terrorists and an activated bomb in New York City all left me wondering what there was to laugh about when the credits rolled. A good peppering of profanities, a shower scene and some drug references also add to this film’s lack of appetizing family fare.

With Hopkins famous for dramas like Shadowlands and Hearts in Atlantis and Rock known for comedic parts in Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back and Me, Myself and Irene, this film proves these two names make for bad company on the same marquee.

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Kerry Bennett

Bad company parents' guide.

Both Kevin and Jake were portrayed as being gifted in their own ways. How much do education, experience and native intelligence play into the smart factor? Are there important lessons to be learned both in and out of the classroom?

Julie, Haynes’ girlfriend, feels trapped in her situation and plans to pull up stakes and head to Seattle. How can moving to a new area give you a fresh start at life? Can it be difficult to leave behind the support of family or friends?

The most recent home video release of Bad Company movie is November 11, 2002. Here are some details…

Related home video titles:.

Cats and Dogs is another story where a novice is requited for covert operations, while The Incredible Adventures of Wallace and Gromit , and The Emperor’s New Groove feature unlikely pairs working together.

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‘Civil War’ Review: We Have Met the Enemy and It Is Us. Again.

In Alex Garland’s tough new movie, a group of journalists led by Kirsten Dunst, as a photographer, travels a United States at war with itself.

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‘Civil War’ | Anatomy of a Scene

The writer and director alex garland narrates a sequence from his film..

“My name is Alex Garland and I’m the writer director of ‘Civil War’. So this particular clip is roughly around the halfway point of the movie and it’s these four journalists and they’re trying to get, in a very circuitous route, from New York to DC, and encountering various obstacles on the way. And this is one of those obstacles. What they find themselves stuck in is a battle between two snipers. And they are close to one of the snipers and the other sniper is somewhere unseen, but presumably in a large house that sits over a field and a hill. It’s a surrealist exchange and it’s surrounded by some very surrealist imagery, which is they’re, in broad daylight in broad sunshine, there’s no indication that we’re anywhere near winter in the filming. In fact, you can kind of tell it’s summer. But they’re surrounded by Christmas decorations. And in some ways, the Christmas decorations speak of a country, which is in disrepair, however silly it sounds. If you haven’t put away your Christmas decorations, clearly something isn’t going right.” “What’s going on?” “Someone in that house, they’re stuck. We’re stuck.” “And there’s a bit of imagery. It felt like it hit the right note. But the interesting thing about that imagery was that it was not production designed. We didn’t create it. We actually literally found it. We were driving along and we saw all of these Christmas decorations, basically exactly as they are in the film. They were about 100 yards away, just piled up by the side of the road. And it turned out, it was a guy who’d put on a winter wonderland festival. People had not dug his winter wonderland festival, and he’d gone bankrupt. And he had decided just to leave everything just strewn around on a farmer’s field, who was then absolutely furious. So in a way, there’s a loose parallel, which is the same implication that exists within the film exists within real life.” “You don’t understand a word I say. Yo. What’s over there in that house?” “Someone shooting.” “It’s to do with the fact that when things get extreme, the reasons why things got extreme no longer become relevant and the knife edge of the problem is all that really remains relevant. So it doesn’t actually matter, as it were, in this context, what side they’re fighting for or what the other person’s fighting for. It’s just reduced to a survival.”

By Manohla Dargis

A blunt, gut-twisting work of speculative fiction, “Civil War” opens with the United States at war with itself — literally, not just rhetorically. In Washington, D.C., the president is holed up in the White House; in a spookily depopulated New York, desperate people wait for water rations. It’s the near-future, and rooftop snipers, suicide bombers and wild-eyed randos are in the fight while an opposition faction with a two-star flag called the Western Forces, comprising Texas and California — as I said, this is speculative fiction — is leading the charge against what remains of the federal government. If you’re feeling triggered, you aren’t alone.

It’s mourning again in America, and it’s mesmerizingly, horribly gripping. Filled with bullets, consuming fires and terrific actors like Kirsten Dunst running for cover, the movie is a what-if nightmare stoked by memories of Jan. 6. As in what if the visions of some rioters had been realized, what if the nation was again broken by Civil War, what if the democratic experiment called America had come undone? If that sounds harrowing, you’re right. It’s one thing when a movie taps into childish fears with monsters under the bed; you’re eager to see what happens because you know how it will end (until the sequel). Adult fears are another matter.

In “Civil War,” the British filmmaker Alex Garland explores the unbearable if not the unthinkable, something he likes to do. A pop cultural savant, he made a splashy zeitgeist-ready debut with his 1996 best seller “The Beach,” a novel about a paradise that proves deadly, an evergreen metaphor for life and the basis for a silly film . That things in the world are not what they seem, and are often far worse, is a theme that Garland has continued pursuing in other dark fantasies, first as a screenwriter (“ 28 Days Later ”), and then as a writer-director (“ Ex Machina ”). His résumé is populated with zombies, clones and aliens, though reliably it is his outwardly ordinary characters you need to keep a closer watch on.

By the time “Civil War” opens, the fight has been raging for an undisclosed period yet long enough to have hollowed out cities and people’s faces alike. It’s unclear as to why the war started or who fired the first shot. Garland does scatter some hints; in one ugly scene, a militia type played by a jolting, scarily effective Jesse Plemons asks captives “what kind of American” they are. Yet whatever divisions preceded the conflict are left to your imagination, at least partly because Garland assumes you’ve been paying attention to recent events. Instead, he presents an outwardly and largely post-ideological landscape in which debates over policies, politics and American exceptionalism have been rendered moot by war.

‘Civil War’ Is Designed to Disturb You

One thing that remains familiar amid these ruins is the movie’s old-fashioned faith in journalism. Dunst, who’s sensational, plays Lee, a war photographer who works for Reuters alongside her friend, a reporter, Joel (the charismatic Wagner Moura). They’re in New York when you meet them, milling through a crowd anxiously waiting for water rations next to a protected tanker. It’s a fraught scene; the restless crowd is edging into mob panic, and Lee, camera in hand, is on high alert. As Garland’s own camera and Joel skitter about, Lee carves a path through the chaos, as if she knows exactly where she needs to be — and then a bomb goes off. By the time it does, an aspiring photojournalist, Jessie (Cailee Spaeny), is also in the mix.

The streamlined, insistently intimate story takes shape once Lee, Joel, Jessie and a veteran reporter, Sammy (Stephen McKinley Henderson), pile into a van and head to Washington. Joel and Lee are hoping to interview the president (Nick Offerman), and Sammy and Jessie are riding along largely so that Garland can make the trip more interesting. Sammy serves as a stabilizing force (Henderson fills the van with humanizing warmth), while Jessie plays the eager upstart Lee takes under her resentful wing. It’s a tidily balanced sampling that the actors, with Garland’s banter and via some cozy downtime, turn into flesh-and-blood personalities, people whose vulnerability feeds the escalating tension with each mile.

As the miles and hours pass, Garland adds diversions and hurdles, including a pair of playful colleagues, Tony and Bohai (Nelson Lee and Evan Lai), and some spooky dudes guarding a gas station. Garland shrewdly exploits the tense emptiness of the land, turning strangers into potential threats and pretty country roads into ominously ambiguous byways. Smartly, he also recurrently focuses on Lee’s face, a heartbreakingly hard mask that Dunst lets slip brilliantly. As the journey continues, Garland further sketches in the bigger picture — the dollar is near-worthless, the F.B.I. is gone — but for the most part, he focuses on his travelers and the engulfing violence, the smoke and the tracer fire that they often don’t notice until they do.

Despite some much-needed lulls (for you, for the narrative rhythm), “Civil War” is unremittingly brutal or at least it feels that way. Many contemporary thrillers are far more overtly gruesome than this one, partly because violence is one way unimaginative directors can put a distinctive spin on otherwise interchangeable material: Cue the artful fountains of arterial spray. Part of what makes the carnage here feel incessant and palpably realistic is that Garland, whose visual approach is generally unfussy, doesn’t embellish the violence, turning it into an ornament of his virtuosity. Instead, the violence is direct, at times shockingly casual and unsettling, so much so that its unpleasantness almost comes as a surprise.

If the violence feels more intense than in a typical genre shoot ’em up, it’s also because, I think, with “Civil War,” Garland has made the movie that’s long been workshopped in American political discourse and in mass culture, and which entered wider circulation on Jan. 6. The raw power of Garland’s vision unquestionably owes much to the vivid scenes that beamed across the world that day when rioters, some wearing T-shirts emblazoned with “ MAGA civil war ,” swarmed the Capitol. Even so, watching this movie, I also flashed on other times in which Americans have relitigated the Civil War directly and not, on the screen and in the streets.

Movies have played a role in that relitigation for more than a century, at times grotesquely. Two of the most famous films in history — D.W. Griffith’s 1915 racist epic “The Birth of a Nation” (which became a Ku Klux Klan recruitment tool) and the romantic 1939 melodrama “Gone With the Wind” — are monuments to white supremacy and the myth of the Southern Lost Cause. Both were critical and popular hits. In the decades since, filmmakers have returned to the Civil War era to tell other stories in films like “Glory,” “Lincoln” and “Django Unchained” that in addressing the American past inevitably engage with its present.

There are no lofty or reassuring speeches in “Civil War,” and the movie doesn’t speak to the better angels of our nature the way so many films try to. Hollywood’s longstanding, deeply American imperative for happy endings maintains an iron grip on movies, even in ostensibly independent productions. There’s no such possibility for that in “Civil War.” The very premise of Garland’s movie means that — no matter what happens when or if Lee and the rest reach Washington — a happy ending is impossible, which makes this very tough going. Rarely have I seen a movie that made me so acutely uncomfortable or watched an actor’s face that, like Dunst’s, expressed a nation’s soul-sickness so vividly that it felt like an X-ray.

Civil War Rated R for war violence and mass death. Running time: 1 hour 49 minutes. In theaters.

An earlier version of this review misidentified an organization in the Civil War in the movie. It is the Western Forces, not the Western Front.

How we handle corrections

Manohla Dargis is the chief film critic for The Times. More about Manohla Dargis

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20 comedy films that are so bad they’re good

Posted: March 22, 2024 | Last updated: March 22, 2024

We all have our favorite "bad" comedies that we put on to laugh. Just because a film didn't do well with critics doesn't mean it is entirely bad. Here are 20 comedies, over the past few decades, that are so bad, they're good.

'The Cable Guy' (1996)

The movie is... something else. A fever dream, maybe. The Cable Guy is memorable and enjoyable for so many reasons. The first is Jim Carrey being Jim Carrey. The entire cast and crew are absolutely stellar; with Judd Apatow producing, Ben Stiller directing, and the acting talents of Matthew Broderick, Leslie Mann, and Jack Black, a beautiful dark comedy was born. Also, Apatow and Mann met on the set of this film, so it gets extra points for that. Super quotable and underrated, in my opinion.

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'Spice World' (1997)

Not going to lie, I don't remember much of this film, but I don't think you really have to to love it. If you are a '90s baby, this film belongs in your collection, especially since it is impossible to stream anywhere! Rewatching Spice World is an absolute treat because you are reminded that incredibly talented actors Alan Cumming, Richard E. Grant, and Stephen Fry are somehow in this! It's just so much fun, and we live for the nostalgia.

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'Joe Dirt' (2001)

It could be because I grew up in the Midwest, but Joe Dirt was a staple in my household. I am only just now finding out that Adam Sandler was an executive producer, which makes a lot of sense as to why I love this film. David Spade is great in anything he's in, but he and Sandler working together is always magic. Sure, Joe Dirt has questionable moments, but it is a heartwarming story of a man trying to find his family. Once again, an awesome cast that has provided us with so many hilarious quotes, making it one of the better "bad" good movies. The sequel , on the other hand, is another story. 

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'Mr. Deeds' (2002)

This film got ripped to shreds by critics, so I wasn't expecting to love it. But, come on, it's Adam Sandler. Sure, I was a kid when I first watched this and didn't realize it was a remake of Frank Capra's 1936 film, Mr. Deeds Goes to Town , but it stands on its own. Sandler has a way of making audiences fall in "lub" with whatever character he plays, Deeds included. Of course, it is no masterpiece, but it is humorous and worth putting on if you need a good laugh. So I would have to strongly disagree with "top critic" Peter Bradshaw from the Guardian; Mr.  Deeds is, in fact, funnier than (checks notes)... orphanage fires ?? 

'White Chicks' (2004)

It's a comfort movie; what can I say? Or an emotional support bad comedy? Either way, I don't know many people who don't like this movie, but it has bad reviews for some reason. Obviously, not a perfect film and probably doesn't age well like most comedies from the 2000s, but it's become somewhat of a cult classic. I mean, who can forget the iconic "A Thousand Miles" scene with Terry Crews in the convertible?? Legendary!

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'John Tucker Must Die' (2006)

We love a good bad rom-com! Honestly, any comedy released in 2006 is probably considered bad. I don't make the rules, but I also don't care about the rules. This film had everything, or rather, it had everyone: Ashanti, Brittany Snow, Sophia Bush, Penn Badgley, and so on. Who doesn't love a classic revenge story where everyone, ultimately, learns their lesson in the end? That might cover just about every high school movie ever to exist, but again, they make for perfect comfort movies. Ask yourself, "Would I put this on during a sleepover?" If the answer is yes, it's a good movie!

'The Benchwarmers' (2006)

Another Adam Sandler-produced project, The Benchwarmers was stupidly funny, and we wouldn't have it any other way! It's hard to hate on a film where it was just a bunch of friends hanging out and having fun, but critics always find a way. Again, most Sandler films are in no way masterpieces and should not be critiqued as such. In middle school, this movie was one of the funniest things we had ever seen, especially with Napoleon Dynamite himself (Jon Heder) joining the crew. If the movie becomes an inside joke with you and your friends, it's a keeper.

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'The Pink Panther' (2006)

Where do I even begin with this one? Out of all of the films on this list, I probably watch The Pink Panther the most. Say what you want about it, but it is an absolute riot from beginning to end. I will quote this movie until the day I die — from "so you are Yuri the trainer who trains" to "I would like to buy a hamburger." Steve Martin never misses, Kevin Kline is just iconic, and Beyonce... Need I say more?  Give me an incredible cast with a subpar plot, and to me, that's cinema. 

'Employee of the Month' (2006)

Don't worry, we're almost out of the year 2006! Granted, this was the era of Dane Cook, and everything he did was funny, at least to me. Regardless, the rest of the cast was great; Dax Shepard and Efren Ramirez delivered some funny moments, as well as Zack's (Cook) crew. It all comes down to how quotable the movie is and whether or not you would watch it again, even if it's just a low-key night in. After all, sometimes you just need a simple comedy to lighten the mood.

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'Grandma's Boy' (2006)

I know, I know. Too many Adam Sandler-produced movies on this list. But it's the last one, so, ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. This movie... is dumb, yes. Hilarious? Also yes. I went to a rooftop screening of this movie in LA, if that says anything about the cult following of this film. We have Sandler's peeps: Peter Dante, Allen Covert, and Nick Swardson (also co-writers), plus Jonah Hill, Linda Cardellini, and so many more hilarious actors in this underrated comedy. Why watch it? How about, why not?

'Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story' (2007)

Walk Hard was somewhat mixed with positive critic reviews (oddly enough) but still bombed at the box office. If you get it, you get it. This film is comedy genius, parodying biopics like Walk the Line (2005) and Ray (2004) that spoof various musicians along the way. If you needed more reasons to watch, the Beatles scene with Jack Black, Paul Rudd, Justin Long, and Jason Schwartzman is one of the best things you'll ever see. 

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'Hot Rod' (2007)

I remember watching Hot Rod for the first time on a DVD rental and falling in love when Rod Kimble suffered an extremely long and painful fall. This is the first film by The Lonely Island following their recent popularity on Saturday Night Live,  and they absolutely knocked it out of the park. The movie would not be the cult classic that it is if it weren't for the entire cast being incredibly good sports; with star power and SNL cast members/alums, this film is up there with Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story  simply because it is just a good time.

'Observe and Report' (2009)

Observe and Report proves that a good cast is enough to make a decent (to most) comedy. This film is, in one word, underrated. Granted, I watched a lot of bad movies back in the day, but are they bad if you enjoy them? Seth Rogen, Anna Faris, Michael Pena, and Aziz Ansari always deliver, and somehow, Ray Liotta is there, too. That said, it was 2009, and there are some questionable pieces of dialogue, so take it for what it is: a dumb comedy. 

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'Year One' (2009)

Year One is on just about everyone's list of dumb comedies they rewatch regularly, and it should be despite critics' ratings. This was Harold Ramis' last acting role and his last film as a director. Fans of the movie recognize the flaws and love it anyway. If you're looking for a straightforward plot, you will be disappointed, but where is the fun in that? Honestly, just enjoy the ride that is any Apatow-produced project. 

'Fanboys' (2009)

First, no, I do not like that this film was produced by Weinstein Co. and, apparently, Kevin Spacey. But this film holds a special place in my heart because, well, Star Wars . Fanboys is for Star Wars fanatics with a sense of humor. Dan Fogler, Jay Baruchel, Sam Huntington, Chris Martinez, and Kristen Bell are absolutely hilarious, and Seth Rogen plays two different characters, so that's fun. We get a few unexpected cameos that make it worth a watch. It really made my friends and I want a Star Wars van of our own and taught us all a valuable lesson: "Nobody calls Han Solo a b—h!" 

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'30 Minutes or Less' (2011)

Not going to lie, the fact that this movie is based on real events is kind of off-putting, but aside from that, it's not terrible. Again, great actors with a script that could have been better, but there are a lot of funny moments that make me want to rewatch it every now and then. Michael Pena as the hitman is probably the funniest part of the entire movie, and of course, Danny McBride makes for a great dumb villain. With Ben Stiller as producer, it's not a complete dud, right?

'We're the Millers' (2013)

We're the Millers unsurprisingly did better with audiences than critics. Maybe not your first choice to see in the theater, but it makes for a great rental on a night in. However, I would probably still see it in a theater because critics were wrong on this one! Jason Sudeikis, Jennifer Aniston, and many other talented actors make for a well-rounded cast that makes this film so much fun to watch. 10/10.

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'The Interview' (2014)

I was not in a hurry to watch The Interview , but I'm glad it exists just because, looking back on it now, the controversy surrounding the film was so ridiculous... and it was hilarious! A classic Seth Rogen/Evan Goldberg collaboration, this film gives their fans everything they loved about Superbad (2007) and Pineapple Express  (2008), plus a Katy Perry-loving Kim Jong-un played by Randall Park. It has also given us the ever-inspiring phrase, "They hate us because they ain't us!" Brb, going to rewatch this immediately. 

'The Package' (2018)

I would say that this movie is probably a stretch for most people, but going in with zero expectations, The Package was low-key hilarious. As a fan of Eduardo Franco ( Stranger Things, Booksmart ) and Geraldine Viswanathan ( Miracle Workers, Blockers ), I figured it was worth a watch, and I was right! Though the critics' consensus on Rotten Tomatoes states that "a pėnis joke does not a movie make," I have to politely disagree. 

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'Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga' (2020)

Netflix film Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga came to us at a time when we all needed a laugh. Though the 2020 Eurovision Song Contest was canceled due to the pandemic, the film gave audiences an appreciation for the event despite how ridiculous it may have been. Critics gave it mixed reviews, basically saying that the original music was great but then blasted the script and runtime. To me, the film was creative and unique, and for a Netflix original, that's huge.

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Bad Boys: Ride or Die

This Summer, the world's favorite Bad Boys are back with their iconic mix of edge-of-your seat action and outrageous comedy but this time with a twist: Miami's finest are now on the run. This Summer, the world's favorite Bad Boys are back with their iconic mix of edge-of-your seat action and outrageous comedy but this time with a twist: Miami's finest are now on the run. This Summer, the world's favorite Bad Boys are back with their iconic mix of edge-of-your seat action and outrageous comedy but this time with a twist: Miami's finest are now on the run.

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Capt. Conrad Howard : [on video] You're my bad boys. Now clear my name.

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Bad Company Reviews

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Mar 16, 2007

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5 | Jul 4, 2005

Appropriate title. Don't invite this film into your home.

Full Review | Original Score: 1/5 | Sep 21, 2003

Sea of Love with a black guy. Nothing new or interesting here.

Full Review | Original Score: 1/5 | Jul 14, 2003

Full Review | Original Score: 5/10 | Jun 5, 2003

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5 | Feb 4, 2003

Full Review | Original Score: 1/4 | Oct 10, 2002

Full Review | Original Score: D | Jun 6, 2002

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/4 | Jan 1, 2000

Full Review | Original Score: 4/10 | Jan 1, 2000

The plot moves like clockwork, surprising us, then surprising us again, but I liked Bad Company more for its style, look and feel.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/4 | Jan 1, 2000

50 Terrible Movies by Great Directors

By Andy Greene

Andy Greene

Show us a director who never created at least one genuine turkey of a movie, and we’ll show you a director with an extremely short career. There’s simply too many things that can go wrong once a movie goes into production: The budget can get slashed, filming might start before the script is finalized, key actors could drop out, and the studio could meddle in all sorts of irksome ways.

That’s why titans of cinema like Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, Steven Spielgerg, James Cameron, and Ridley Scott all have at least one movie they wish they could erase from their IMDB page. Some of them were made when they were young novices without any real ability to say no. Some of them were made at the peak of their powers when they made horrid bad decisions out of greed, hubris, or temporary insanity. And many were shot in the waning days of their careers when getting a green light for any project was difficult. 

With all this in mind, we assembled this list of 50 truly terrible movies by otherwise brilliant directors. We know some of these will be controversial choices. There are folks out there that truly love Alien 3, Star Wars Episode One: The Phantom Menace , and Jupiter Ascending . One moviegoer’s disaster is another moviegoer’s cult classic. But we don’t think there are many hardcore Jack , North , or Wild, Wild Wes t fans out there. These are terrible, terrible movies. If we gave truth serum to Francis Ford Coppola, Rob Reiner, and Barry Sonnenfeld, they’d all likely agree. 

‘Renaissance Man’ (Penny Marshall)

In the period between 1988 and 1992, Penny Marshall gifted the world with Big , Awakenings , and A League of Their Own . She could have followed that trio up with virtually any movie she wanted since they were all enormous critical and commercial hits. Sadly, Marshall’s next project was Renaissance Man . It’s a dim-witted comedy about an unemployed ad executive (Danny DeVito) who finds himself teaching cadets on a military training base. They don’t know much about Shakespeare. He doesn’t know much about the military. They learn from each other in an endless series of sitcom cliches. A young Mark Wahlberg raps about Hamlet. All of this is as horrible as you can imagine. “Watching it, I felt embarrassed for the actors, who are asked to inhabit scenes so contrived and artificial that no possible skill could bring them to life,” Roger Ebert wrote. “It’s hard to believe that this is the work of Penny Marshall, whose films like Big and A League of Their Own seemed filled with a breezy confidence.” 

‘The Fountain’ (Darren Aronofsky)

It’s slightly unfair to trash The Fountain since the final version is so wildly far off from what director Darren Aronofsky had in mind when work on the film began. The original plan was to place Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett in the lead roles of a $70 million film. When the budget was sliced down to $35 million with Hugh Jackman and Rachel Weisz as the stars, Aronofsky had to make some drastic cuts that severely compromised his vision. But we can only judge what wound up on the screen, and that’s a film where Jackman plays a Spanish conquistador searching for an eternal life elixir, a modern-day scientist trying to cure his wife’s brain disease, and a 26th-century man traveling through space with a tree. Critics were polarized by the film, but most viewers were simply baffled and bored. “I will concede the film is not a great success,” wrote Roger Ebert. “And yet I believe we have not seen the real film. When a $75 million production goes into turnaround and is made for $35 million, elements get eliminated. When a film telling three stories and spanning thousands of years has a running time of 96 minutes, scenes must have been cut out. There will someday be a director’s cut of this movie, and that’s the cut I want to see.”

‘How Do You Know’ (James L. Brooks)

James L. Brooks spent so much time in television working on shows like The Mary Tyler Moore Show , Taxi , and The Simpsons that he’s only directed six movies. The best of the bunch ( Terms of Endearment , Broadcast News , As Good As It Gets ) are master classes in storytelling. The middling ones ( I’ll Do Anything , Spanglish ) reveal his limitations as a writer-director, but they’re still worth watching if you come across them on basic cable. And then there’s his 2010 romantic comedy How Do You Know . It has a wonderful cast led by Reese Witherspoon, Paul Rudd, Owen Wilson, and Jack Nicholson in his final film role to date. Witherspoon plays a softball player torn between a cocky baseball player (Wilson) and a charming businessman (Rudd). “Nothing heats up,” Roger Ebert wrote. “The movie doesn’t lead us, it simply stays in step.” It’s a real bummer that Nicholson ended his career on this deeply forgettable rom-com. For a long time, it seemed like it might be the last Brooks movie as well. But he’s assembled Jamie Lee Curtis, Woody Harrelson, Ayo Edebiri, Albert Brooks, Kumail Nanjiani, and Spike Fearn for an upcoming movie he’s calling Ella McCay . Let’s hope it closer in spirit to Terms of Endearment and As Good As It Gets than How Do You Know . That one almost single handedly killed the rom-com. 

‘The Truth About Charlie’ (Jonathan Demme)

Remaking a classic movie is always a very risky proposition. There’s always the chance you’ll pull off a miracle like The Birdcage , A Star Is Born , True Grit , or Oceans 11 . But odds are much greater you’ll fall way short of the original and get filleted by the critics. The Truth About Charlie is an excellent example. The 2002 Jonthan Demme mystery is a remake of the 1963 Cary Grant/Audrey Hepburn film Charade . It centers around a woman who discovers her husband is dead, millions of dollars are missing, and all sorts of unsavory characters are after her for it. Demme cast Mark Walhberg in the thankless position of replacing Grant. (This is just one year after Wahlberg’s Planet of the Apes fiasco). Thandie Newton did a much better job with the Hepburn part, but there’s no earthly reason for this movie to exist. The original is better in every conceivable way. It earned a paltry $7.1 million on a $60 million budget, and it was the second bomb in a row for Demme after Beloved . But Beloved was a noble failure. The Truth About Charlie was just a regular failure. Demme soldiered on by remaking The Manchurian Candidate as his next movie. But by casting Denzel Washington and Meryl Streep — and not Marky Mark — he actually pulled it off. 

‘Look Who’s Talking Too’ (Amy Heckerling)

The original Look Who’s Talking isn’t a bad movie. And when you compare it with every other movie about a talking baby in Hollywood history, it’s basically Citizen Kane . The third movie in the series, Look Who’s Talking Now , frequently appears on lists of the worst movies ever made. That’s the one where the dogs talk. But original Look Who’s Talking director Amy Heckerling didn’t have any involvement with that one. Sadly, she co-wrote and directed 1990’s Look Who’s Talking Too . This quickie sequel came just one year after the original, and it reunites Kirstie Alley, John Travolta, and Bruce Willis as the voice of baby Mikey. Roseanne Barr joined the team this time as the voice of his new baby sister. (Mikey can talk at this point like any toddler, but he somehow still has very adult thoughts. Will the Willis voice ever leave his head? Was he haunted by it forever? Is he in a mental asylum somewhere now?) The original movie was about a single woman trying to keep her job and deal with the responsibilities of motherhood. The sequel is nothing but dumb sitcom hijinks. Five years later, Hecklering wrote and directed Clueless . All was forgiven. 

‘Bicentennial Man’ (Christopher Columbus)

Christopher Columbus has an incredible ability to create comedies that bring tears at unexpected moments. This is true for Mrs. Doubtfire , Stepmom , and even the first two Home Alone movies. (There’s a reason the original reduces George Costanza to a sobbing mess on Seinfeld .) But the formula didn’t work on 1999’s Bicentennial Man , where Robin Williams plays a robot that lives for over 200 years. It’s based on the 1976 Isaac Asimov novelette The Bicentennial Man , but it’s a painfully sappy adaptation where Williams is forced to confront the fact that everyone he loves will eventually die. Much has been written about the brilliant movies of 1999, but nobody cites this one as an example. Fortunately, the fiasco had little impact on Columbus’ career. His next movie was an adaptation of a children’s book about a British boy who learns he’s a wizard on his 11th birthday. That one worked quite well. 

‘Basic’ (John McTiernan)

John McTiernan may not be as well known as many other directors on this list, but he’s the man behind Predator , The Hunt for Red October , Die Hard , and the criminally underrated Die Hard With a Vengeance . In other words, he made the two good Die Hards . He had no involvement with the three shitty ones. (And yes, Die Hard 2 is better than four and five. It still sucks.) If he just made the original Die Hard , he’d deserve a lifetime achievement award at the Oscars. His career took a hit in 1993 when he directed Last Action Hero (which isn’t as bad as legend suggests), and nosedived in 1999 when The 13th Warrior bombed hard. But he bottomed out in 2003 with Basic , an action thriller that reunited the Pulp Fiction team of John Travolta and Samuel J. Jackson. The convoluted plot centers around a DEA agent trying to figure out why an Army Ranger drill sergeant disappeared during a training exercise. There’s a twist ending that’s as stupid as it is implausible. Simply put, it’s the least enjoyable Pulp Fiction reunion you could possibly imagine. It’s been over 20 years since Basic tanked, and McTiernan has yet to direct another movie. (This is largely due to his involvement in the Anthony Pellicano wiretapping scandal, which ultimately sent him to prison for a year in 2013. But that’s a whole other story.)

‘Assassins’ (Richard Donner)

As the movies have shown us over and over again, it’s not easy to retire when you’re a professional assassin. There’s always some nefarious force from your past that strong-arms you into taking one last job. That’s the cliched plot of Richard Donner’s 1995 movie Assassins , starring Sylvester Stallone and Antonio Banderas. This was a few years past the point where Stallone’s name on a poster meant any movie would be an automatic hit, and a few years past the point where Donner churned out stunning movies like The Goonies , Scrooged , Superman , and Lethal Weapon 2 (it’s better than the first) at a remarkable clip. Assassins doesn’t have any of that Lethal Weapon magic. It’s just a turgid action flick that felt like a relic of an earlier time. It was also a huge commercial and critical disappointment that Donner never quite recovered from despite finding moderate success a couple of years later with Mel Gibson’s Conspiracy Theory . 

‘Girl 6’ (Spike Lee)

Spike Lee wrote the first eight movies he directed, including Do the Right Thing , Jungle Fever , Crooklyn , and Malcolm X . But in 1996, he decided to adapt a screenplay by Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Suzan-Lori Parks for the screen. Girl 6 is about a struggling actress who finds work as a phone-sex operator. The work takes a toll on her personal life and mental health before she walks away from it. It’s an interesting premise for a movie, but virtually nothing about it works. “ Girl 6 is Spike Lee’s least successful film,” Roger Ebert wrote, “and the problem is twofold: He doesn’t really know and understand Girl 6, and he has no clear idea of the film’s structure and purpose. If he’d been able to fix the second problem, he might have been able to paper over the first one. Strongly told stories have a way of carrying their characters along with them. But here we have an undefined character in an aimless story. Too bad.”

‘The Good German’ (Steven Soderbergh)

Steven Soderbergh has made just about every kind of movie imaginable. The only thing Solaris , Magic Mike , Erin Brockovich , Oceans 11 , Kafka , and Contagion have in common is that he directed them. But he proved that film noir wasn’t his thing in 2006 when he adapted Joseph Kanon’s spy novel The Good German for the big screen. George Clooney, Cate Blanchett, and Tobey Maguire were given lead roles, and Soderbergh made every effort to make this look like an actual film noir from the Forties, down to black-and-white film stock and a poster that paid homage to Casablanca , but the retro play just didn’t work. He spent so much time on the look and feel that the story suffered. “There isn’t a moment in this self-conscious, uninvolving movie when you aren’t aware you are watching an experiment,” Rene Rodriguez wrote in the Miami Herald , “which might make a good lesson for film school students on what not to do.”

‘Random Hearts’ (Sydney Pollack)

When Harrison Ford agreed to star in a 1995 remake of Sabrina with Tootsie and Three Days of the Condor director Sydney Pollack, it was a rare misfire for the Hollywood superstar. Ford bounced back in 1997 with Air Force One . But he returned to Pollack two years later for Random Hearts , an adaptation of a 1984 Warren Adler novel about a love affair between a congresswoman and a police officer. They meet when their spouses die in a plane crash. It’s a good book, but a deeply boring movie. “It takes forever for this portentous drama to get to the inevitable moment when the chilly congresswoman melts in the dogged cop’s arms,” wrote Newsweek ’s David Ansen, “and when it does, the heat generated by these two attractive stars barely rises above room temperature.”

‘Jupiter Ascending’ (The Wachowskis)

The incredible success of The Matrix and the two sequels gave the Wachowskis a license to basically make whatever movies they wanted. They used it to take on fantastically ambitious movies like Speed Racer , Cloud Atlas, and Jupiter Ascending . When they all failed to achieve anything remotely comparable to Matrix -level dollars, their “do whatever the fuck you want” license was revoked. But Speed Racer and Cloud Atlas have genuine cult followings. They are flawed, but interesting. Jupiter Ascending is just a friggin’ mess. It’s a Mila Kunis/Channing Tatum space opera about a cleaning lady on a futuristic Earth who finds herself on an interplanetary adventure alongside a genetically engineered soldier. Nearly everyone involved in the movie said they knew they were making a turkey the whole time, especially since the budget got chopped in half at the last minute. “It was a nightmare from the jump,” Tatum said in 2022. “It was a sideways movie. All of us were there for seven months, busting our hump. It was just tough.” It was also the last movie the Wachowskis made as a duo. Lana Wachowski followed it up by directing The Matrix Resurrections by herself. It was not a great movie, especially when compared to the original, but it’s better than Jupiter Ascending by absurd degrees. 

‘Downsizing’ (Alexander Payne)

As Alexander Payne proved yet again with 2023’s The Holdovers , he’s a master when it comes to mixing comedy with drama. For more evidence of this, look back to Election, About Schmidt, Sideways, and Nebraska . In 2017, though, his instincts failed him when he made Downsizing . In the strong likelihood you forget Downsizing exists, it’s a Matt Damon movie about a man who shrinks his body down to five-inches tall to live in an experimental community with other tiny people. It’s supposed to be a land of bliss, but things go awry very quickly. “It’s the rare movie that seems to execute every part of its concept absolutely wrong,” wrote NPR’s Andrew Lapin, “a narrative, tonal, visual and sociopolitical fiasco the likes of which haven’t been seen in many moons.”

‘Garbo Talks’ (Sidney Lumet)

Sidney Lumet made his directorial debut in 1957 with 12 Angry Men. Fifty years later, he wrapped up his career with Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead . It was a stunning finale, but he had a handful of misfires along the way. The low point was 1984’s Garbo Talks starring Carrie Fisher, Ann Bancroft, and Ron Silver. It’s about a terminally ill woman who tries to meet reclusive silent-film star Greta Garbo before she dies, drawing a paparazzo and her daughter-in-law into the quest. It’s an intriguing premise, though the payoff is absurdly disappointing. “With a buildup like this, Garbo’s entrance had better be spectacular,” Roger Ebert wrote in a one-star pan. “Unfortu­nately, it’s not. It’s such an anticli­max that it would have been more effective for the woman to die with­out ever meeting Garbo.”

‘The Ward’ (John Carpenter)

It’s not hard to pick out John Carpenter’s greatest triumphs as a director. They are clearly the original Halloween in 1978, Escape From New York in 1981, and The Thing in 1982. Many detractors point to the 1992 Chevy Chase bomb Memoirs of an Invisible Man or the 2001 sci-fi Western horror mashup Ghosts of Mars as his worst moments, but those fail in ways that are semi-interesting and occasionally somewhat novel. A small cult has grown around Ghosts of Mars since it’s so damn odd. But there’s no cult around the 2010 Amber Heard horror film The Ward . It’s just a rote, drab flick about a woman stuck in a haunted mental ward. “[It] continues the painful decline of a director who seems more nostalgic for past glories than excited about new ideas,” The New York Times ’ Jeannette Catsoulis wrote in a pan. “Quaintly old-fashioned in style, plot and special effects, this familiar tale of female derangement and institutional abuse is too tame to scare and too shallow to engage.”

‘The Stepford Wives’ (Frank Oz)

Frank Oz is best known as the puppetmaster behind Yoda, Miss Piggy, Cookie Monster, and Grover. But he’s also a gifted filmmaker who directed The Muppets Take Manhattan , Little Shop of Horrors, and What About Bob? (That last film is the single funniest movie in Hollywood history. We don’t care how crazy that sounds. We stand by it.) But in 2004, he had the misfortune of directing a remake of the 1975 cult thriller The Stepford Wive s. The project was a fiasco before filming even started since John and Joan Cusack dropped out at the last minute to take care of their ailing mother. Nicole Kidman, Matthew Broderick, Bette Midler, Christopher Walken, and Glenn Close wound up with the lead roles, and they simply didn’t click onscreen or off. Test audiences hated the first cut, and last-second edits did nothing to improve the end result. “I had too much money,” Oz admitted in 2007, “and I was too responsible and concerned for Paramount. I was too concerned for the producers. And I didn’t follow my instincts.”

‘Gemini Man’ (Ang Lee)

Ang Lee is a remarkably versatile director who has given the world everything from The Ice Storm and Brokeback Mountain to Life of Pi, Hulk, and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon . These movies have nothing in common besides Lee’s deft touch. But that failed him in 2019 when he directed Gemini Man , where an assassin played by Will Smith battles a younger clone of himself thanks to deaging effects. This made for a very cool movie poster, an interesting trailer, and a horrid movie. “ Gemini Man doesn’t know what it wants,” wrote Adam Graham of the Detroit News. “One on hand it’s an action extravaganza pushing the boundaries of special effects, on the other it’s a science-fiction experiment exploring the edges of humanity. Like the character at its center, it’s at war with itself.”

‘Buddy Buddy’ (Billy Wilder)

There were very few filmmakers in the 1940s and 1950s sharper than Billy Wilder. This was the period when he directed Double Indemnity , Sunset Boulevard, Sabrina, The Seven Year Itch , and Some Like It Hot. But Hollywood went through a major stylistic shift in the Sixties when a new generation of talent rose up, and Wilder’s brand of filmmaking was suddenly passé. He continued working through the Seventies, but nothing seemed to connect. His low point was 1981’s Buddy Buddy, which wound up being his final film even though he lived another two decades. It’s a Walter Matthau/Jack Lemmon remake of a French comedy about a Mafia hitman at a hotel who runs into a depressed husband that just learned his wife is having an affair. Wilder does his best to revive Lemmon and Mathau’s Odd Couple energy, but the laughs simply don’t come. “I hadn’t been working enough, and I was anxious to get back on the horse and do what I do — write, direct,” Wilder said years later. “This wasn’t a picture I would have chosen.”

‘Goya’s Ghosts’ (Milos Forman)

Milos Forman picked his projects very carefully, which is why The People vs. Larry Flynt and Man on the Moon are the only movies he created in the Nineties. And even though he lived until 2018, the only movie he created after the Nineties was the 2007 Javier Bardem/Natalie Portman/Stellan Skarsgård historical drama Goya’s Ghosts . It’s the story of Spanish painter Francisco Goya living through the Spanish Inquisition and trying to free his young muse from captivity. “In spite of all the vivid little details, the big picture never comes into focus,” wrote the AV Club ’s Tasha Robinson. “The film lacks a center, and the obvious one — Goya’s art — is dismissed as irrelevant in the first scene. If Forman is trying to communicate that art isn’t an effective way to change American society, he’s proved his point neatly with this muddled, wandering dud.”

‘Sphere’ (Barry Levinson)

Tremendous buzz swirled around Sphere prior to the initial critic screening in 1998. The story of an ancient alien spacecraft discovered on the ocean floor is one of Micheal Crichton’s greatest books. Director Barry Levinson — the man behind Diner, Rain Man , and Sleepers — was hired to direct an adaptation with Dustin Hoffman, Sharon Stone, and Samuel L. Jackson in lead roles. It seemed like we were going to get another Jurassic Park . But then critics saw the thing. “The more the plot reveals, the more we realize how little there is to reveal,” Roger Ebert wrote, “until finally the movie disintegrates into flaccid scenes where the surviving characters sit around talking about their puzzlements.” The public agreed, and the movie didn’t even make back its budget. Maybe another director will be brave enough one day to try and make a better Sphere movie. In the meantime, the one we have really sucks. 

‘The Last Tycoon’ (Elia Kazan)

In the final months of his life, F. Scott Fitzgerald worked on an epic novel about an Irving Thalberg-like movie studio chief during the golden age of Hollywood. He died before he could finish it, but it was released posthumously as The Last Tycoon . A big-screen adaptation wound up being the final film for director Elia Kazan, and he assembled an amazing cast that included Robert De Niro, Tony Curtis, Robert Mitchum, Jeanne Moreau, and Jack Nicholson. But Kazan was decades past his On the Waterfront prime, and he failed to capture anything close to the magic of his source material. “Kazan’s work seems to be a reaction against the shrill energy he has sometimes used to keep a picture going,” Pauline Kael wrote in the New Yorker . “He’s trying something quiet and revelatory, but he seems to have disowned too much of his temperament.”

‘Oz The Great and Powerful’ (Sam Raimi)

Two years after James Franco delivered a woefully low-energy performance as the co-host of the Academy Awards, he delivered a woefully low-energy performance as the star of Sam Raimi’s Wizard of Oz prequel Oz the Great and Powerful. Franco stars as a younger version of Frank Morgan’s Wizard character from the 1939 classic, but he possesses none of his impish charm or sense of humor. We learn how the Wizard left Kansas for Oz via hot-air balloon many years before Dorothy, battled evil witches, and established himself as the ruler of the land. But it all feels like a pointless retread, and it’s wildly unimaginative. The man who gave us Evil Dead, A Simple Plan , and the Tobey Maguire Spider-Man trilogy is capable of so much more. 

‘Beyond Therapy’ (Robert Altman)

For his 1987 romantic comedy Beyond Therapy , Robert Altman assembled an amazing cast, including Christopher Guest, Jeff Goldblum, Julie Hagerty, and Glenda Jackson. He even had a novel idea for a movie about two loopy New Yorkers looking for love, and their equally insane psychiatrists. The execution is just abysmal, and not just because Altman set the movie in New York and filmed it in Paris. The jokes don’t land, scenes smash together without any sense of logic or pacing, and it’s impossible to care about the fate of any of the characters. It’s very hard to believe the same director gave us Nashville, McCabe and Mrs. Miller , and The Long Goodbye. 

‘Pocketful of Miracles’ (Frank Capra)

Frank Capra’s 1961 film Pocketful of Miracles came at a major turning point for Hollywood. Old-guard figures like Capra were being cast aside for a new generation of talent. And this would indeed mark his final film, and the first one for young starlet Ann-Margret, who appears in the movie alongside Bette Davis and Glenn Ford. It was also a remake of a film Capra directed in 1933, showing that new ideas were in short supply for the old-timers. It’s a Taming of the Shrew -type story of a wealthy bootlegger who attempts to turn a homeless apple salesman into a member of high society. Davis would revive her career the following year thanks to Whatever Happened to Baby Jane , and Ann-Margret was on the verge of superstardom thanks to Bye Bye Birdie and Viva Las Vegas. But it was a painfully dated commercial disappointment that left Capra in movie jail for the remainder of his life. 

‘Wild Wild West’ (Barry Sonnenfeld)

Will Smith committed one of the greatest blunders in Hollywood history when he turned down a lead role in The Matrix so he could star in Wild , Wild West , a stunningly inept adaptation of a forgotten Sixties television show. But his logic isn’t hard to understand. The Wachowskis didn’t have much of a track record when they shopped around The Matrix , and Smith and Wild Wild West director Barry Sonnenfeld had just teamed up for Men in Black . That was an enormous hit, based around an equally obscure IP, that Smith promoted with a rap song where he basically explained the plot. The (terrible) song somehow hit Number One on the Billboard Hot 100, but nothing else about the movie connected on any level. “ Wild Wild West is a comedy dead zone,” Roger Ebert wrote in a one-star review. “You stare in disbelief as scenes flop and die. The movie is all concept and no content; the elaborate special effects are like watching money burn on the screen.” It’s so bad that we’re calling it Sonnenfeld’s worst movie even though he gave us Nine Lives . That’s the movie about Kevin Spacey trapped in the body of a cat. It’s an unbearably awful movie. But Wild Wild West is even worse. 

‘Phobia’ (John Huston)

John Huston was one of the few great directors of the 1940s and 1950s still churning out movies in the 1980s. And even though 1982’s Annie was hardly on the same level as The African Queen , Key Largo , and The Treasure of the Sierra Madre , it was a genuine hit that families still watch today. The same can’t be said for 1980’s Phobia . The ham-fisted horror movie is about a radical therapist who forces his patients to confront their biggest fears in extreme ways. A murderer comes after them one by one. The whole thing is as predictable and schlocky as this sounds. It was also a colossal bomb that grossed just under $60,000. 

‘The Wings of Eagles’ (John Ford)

John Ford started directing movies so early in Hollywood history that many of them were silent films of the 1910s that have literally been lost. His hot streak lasted for decades and gave us Stagecoach (1939), The Grapes of Wrath (1940), The Searchers ( 1956), and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962). He followed up The Searchers, quite possibly his greatest film, with another John Wayne epic, The Wings of Eagles. It’s a loose biopic of Naval aviator Frank Wead, stretching from the immediate aftermath of World War I to his career in Hollywood and return to the armed services in World War II. The movie is just an hour and 50 minutes, but feels much, much longer. It’s hard to believe it was created by the same team that made The Searchers just one year earlier.

‘The 15:17 to Paris’ (Clint Eastwood)

In 2016, Clint Eastwood took the real-life story of Captain Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger — who famously landed a commercial airline on the Hudson River after the engines blew out — and made an acclaimed hit movie out of it, even though the central drama took place over just a few minutes. For his follow-up project two years later, The 15:17 to Paris , he made a similar movie about three Americans who foiled a terrorist attack on a train traveling from Amsterdam to Paris. Tom Hanks played the lead role in Sully, but Eastwood decided to cast the real-life heroes in The 15:17 to Paris . It was a huge mistake since they simply weren’t professional actors. Their big moment of heroism, like Sully’s, lasted just a few moments. That forced Eastwood to pad the story out in monumentally boring ways by showing their life before the incident, and the aftermath of it. Almost none of it was compelling. “[Eastwood] almost seems to be testing the limits of minimalism, seeing how much artifice he can strip away and still achieve some kind of dramatic impact,” The New York Times wrote. “There is not a lot of suspense, and not much psychological exploration, either.” His 2014 movie Jersey Boys was arguably slightly worse, but we’re going to stick with The 15:17 to Paris as the worst movie Eastwood made throughout a very, very long career. 

‘Joan of Arc’ (Victor Fleming)

It’s almost inarguable that no director in cinematic history had a better year than Victor Fleming in 1939 when directed both The Wizard of Oz and Gone With the Wind , the two films that embody the golden age of Hollywood. He was handed both projects since MGM considered him their resident genius who could handle the grandest of grand productions. His final film wasn’t an MGM production, though it was quite ambitious: Joan of Arc starring Ingrid Bergman. At 33 years old, she was way too old to play the part of the teenage martyr. But that’s the least of the problems with the movie, which is mind-numbingly dull and plodding. By the end, you’re rooting for the title character to finally die just so it can end. According to Hollywood lore, Fleming had an affair with Bergman during the production, which may have thrown off his judgment. Shortly after it came out, Fleming died of a heart attack.

‘Juno and the Paycock’ (Alfred Hitchcock)

Alfred Hitchcock first made a name for himself in the Twenties as the director of acclaimed silent films, most notably the 1927 thriller The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog. But when talkies entered the scene in the early Thirties, he briefly had trouble adjusting to the innovation. This is most evident in 1930’s Juno and the Paycock , where he takes a successful Sean O’Casey play about a family living through the Irish Civil War and merely films it on a soundstage. There are long stretches where the camera doesn’t move an inch, and it feels like a tripod is directing the film. “A fairly deadly case of canned theater,” Jonathan Rosenbaum wrote in the Chicago Reader , “that’s pretty close to what Hitchcock many years later would refer to as ‘photographs of people talking.’” Just four years later, Hitchcock released The Man Who Knew Too Much . It’s a brilliant, innovative movie that grabs your attention in the opening scene and never lets go. In other words, it’s the complete opposite of Juno and the Paycock. 

‘What Planet Are You From?’ (Mike Nichols)

On paper, the 2000 Mike Nichols-directed movie What Planet Are You From? feels like something that couldn’t possibly fail. The science-fiction comedy was co-written by Ed Solomon, who has a stellar track record in this very specific genre thanks to Men in Black and Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure , and it stars a dream team of Garry Shandling, Annette Bening, John Goodman, and Ben Kingsley. Things start to look a bit worse when you realize that Shandling plays an asexual alien that travels to Earth with the goal of impregnating a woman. His penis makes a loud noise whenever he gets aroused. If you think that sounds unfunny, you’re quite correct. Nothing about the movie is even remotely amusing, and it was a massive flop. It’s hard to imagine the film came from the same visionary director who made The Birdcage just four years earlier. There are laughs every 30 seconds in that movie. There are none in What Planet Are You From? Every second of it is agony. 

‘Death Becomes Her’ (Robert Zemeckis)

Back to the Future kicked off a remarkable string of movies for director Robert Zemeckis that continued with Who Framed Roger Rabbit , Back to the Future II, Back to the Future III, Forrest Gump, Contact, What Lies Beneath , and Castaway. These were all big hits that still get a lot of play and love all these years later. But there’s one movie in the middle of that run we didn’t mention, and it’s one Zemeckis probably wishes never happened. We’re talking about 1992’s Death Becomes Her . The supposed comedy stars Meryl Streep, Goldie Hawn, and Bruce Willis, and centers around two self-centered women who drink an eternal-youth potion with disastrous results. The laughs never came, the special effects were cheesy even by 1992 standards, and the reviews were dismal. The major players in this movie all bounced back fairly quickly, leaving this movie as little more than a half-forgotten footnote in their careers.  

‘A Good Year’ (Ridley Scott)

Ridley Scott is at his best when he tries to make something really big, whether that’s a horror movie about a killer extraterrestrial on a spaceship ( Alien ), an historical epic about a Roman warrior ( Gladiator ), or a dystopian sci-fi flick about an android hunter ( Blade Runner ). In 2006, however, he aimed oddly low when he reunited with Gladiator star Russell Crowe for a romantic comedy about a British investment banker who renovates a French estate he inherits from his uncle. It’s incredibly boring and not even remotely funny. “ A Good Year is the movie equivalent of poring over a glossy brochure for a luxury vacation you could never afford while a roughneck salesman (Mr. Crowe) who imagines he has class harangues you to hurry up and make a decision about taking the tour,” Stephen Holden wrote in a New York Times review. “My advice is to resist the pitch.” 

‘Alien 3’ (David Fincher)

David Fincher had a very difficult task in front of him when he signed on to make the third Alien movie. The 28-year-old director had spent the past few years creating ambitious music videos for superstars like Michael Jackson, Madonna, and Aerosmith. But he’d never made a movie, and this one had to follow Ridley Scott’s groundbreaking Alien — and James Cameron’s brilliant Aliens . The project had already been through several script rewrites when Fincher was hired, and the studio second-guessed his every move during the agonizing shoot and editing process. The final product is an absolute mess that nullifies the events of Aliens and ends with Sigourney Weaver’s Ripley character dying, but it’s tough to blame Fincher for it. He was in way over his head, and the studio didn’t have any faith in him. “A lot of people hated Alien 3 ,” Fincher said in 2009, “but no one hated it more than I did.” Three years after the Alien 3 fiasco, Fincher directed Seven . It turned him into one of the biggest directors in Hollywood, leaving Alien 3 as little more than a tough lesson from his past. “I learned then just to be a belligerent asshole,” he said in 2009, “which was really, ‘You have to get what you need to get out of it.’ You have to fight for things you believe in, and you have to be smart about how you position it so that you don’t just become white noise.”

‘Jade’ (William Friedkin)

After Basic Instinct raked in over $350 million in 1992, Hollywood started cranking out erotic thrillers at a furious clip. Most of them were dismal bombs ( Body of Evidence , Color of Night , Sliver ), and the lowest of the low was Jade , which centers around an assistant district attorney investigating a gruesome murder. It’s remembered today mainly as the movie that forever killed David Caruso’s big-screen career just one year after his disastrous decision to quit NYPD Blue . What fewer people remember today is that the man behind The Exorcist and The French Connection , William Friedkin, was the director. He continued to make disappointing movies after this, including the unfortunate 2000 Tommy Lee Jones/Samuel L Jackson misfire Rules of Engagement , but none of them sunk to the lows of Jade .

‘Club Paradise’ (Harold Ramis)

It’s tempting to name latter-day Harold Ramis movies like Year One, The Ice Harvest , or Bedazzled as the low point of his incredible career, and it wouldn’t be completely wrong. He had a real cold streak in the final decade of his life. But at the pinnacle of his Eighties success, directly after Caddyshack and National Lampoon’s Vacation, he directed and co-wrote a little film called Club Paradise starring Robin Williams, Jimmy Cliff, Peter O’Toole, Rick Moranis, Eugene Levy, Andrea Martin, and Brian Doyle-Murray. It’s about a Chicago fireman and a reggae singer who attempt to turn a rundown Carribean vacation spot into a luxury resort. This is two years after he played Egon Spengler in Ghostbusters , a movie he co-wrote. But all of his skills somehow escaped him for Club Paradise . It’s painfully unfunny. If you weren’t an active moviegoer in the mid-Eighties, you probably haven’t even heard of it since it’s been largely erased from the historical record. Ramis took a long break from directing after Club Paradis e, but he came back with Groundhog Day. It’s hard to believe the same man wrote and directed both movies since Groundhog Day is a work of profound genius that grows in stature with each passing year. In other words, it’s the complete and total opposite of Club Paradise. 

‘Junior’ (Ivan Reitman)

Arnold Schwarzenegger showcased surprising comic chops in 1988’s Twins , where he was teamed with Danny DeVito and director Ivan Reitman. Six years later, the trio reunited for Junior . Much like Twins , it’s the story of an unlikely genetic experiment. In Twins , Schwarzenegger and DeVito learn they are siblings who share six different fathers. In Junior, they play doctors who create a fertility drug capable of getting a man pregnant. Twins is very funny and oddly poignant. Junior is extremely unfunny and oddly stupid. It made half as much money as Twins . It was also the end of a very hot streak for Reitman that included Meatballs, Stripes, Ghostbusters, Twins, Kindergarten Cop , and Dave. He had some real turkeys after Junior, including Evolution and My Super Ex-Girlfriend, but none have aged quite as bad as Junior. 

‘Boxcar Bertha’ (Martin Scorsese)

Martin Scorsese was a young director still trying to make a name for himself when he agreed to shoot this sexxed-up Bonnie and Clyde knockoff for Roger Corman on a shoestring budget. It stars Barbara Hershey as an orphan at the height of the Great Depression who teams up with a union boss and starts robbing trains. Like every Corman exploitation movie of this time, it’s packed with sex and violence. Scorsese does everything he can to rise above the budget and source material, but it’s ultimately hopeless. His follow-up project, however, was Mean Streets . It meant he’d never have to take on a work-for-hire project like Boxcar Bertha ever again. 

‘The Stupids’ (John Landis)

In the late 1970s and all through the 1980s, directors John Landis gave the world classic comedies like Animal House, The Blues Brothers, Trading Places, Coming to America , and the criminally underrated Spies Like Us . But like a hair metal band, he had a really tough time adjusting to the Nineties. After delivering the back-to-back bombs Oscar and Innocent Bloo d, and underwhelming with Beverly Hills Cop III , he reached a low point when he agreed to adapt the popular children’s book series The Stupids into a movie starring Tom Arnold. (This was shortly after True Lies when “Tom Arnold Movie Star” briefly seemed like it might be a thing.) There’s no reason a movie about morons can’t be great fun. Dumb and Dumber proved that two years earlier. But The Stupids ain’t Dumb and Dumber . It’s just an endless series of groan-inducing gags and a ridiculous plot about a terrorist attack uncovered by The Stupids . It was also such a colossal bomb that it nearly ended Landis’ directing career. 

‘The Ladykillers’ (The Coen Brothers)

In 1955, Alec Guiness starred in the superb black comedy The Ladykillers , which is about an elaborate train heist foiled by an old lady. In 2004, it was remade by the Coen brothers with Tom Hanks in the lead. The Coen brothers are very good at writing their own movies. And a perfect Ladykillers already exists. If they found a clever spin on the original movie, perhaps they could have justified this endeavor. But this is just a pointless rehash that moves to action from London to Mississippi and has them robbing a riverboat instead of a train. In a crucial misstep, they forgot to make it funny. The film racked up a respectable $77 million at the box office, way more than The Big Lebowski earned. But there’s never been any Ladykillers resurgence of any sort. It’s largely just been forgotten. 

‘How The Grinch Stole Christmas’ (Ron Howard)

Theodor Seuss Geisel (a.k.a. Dr. Seuss) left an astounding amount of money on the table during his long life by refusing to allow Hollywood to turn his children’s books into live-action movies. He knew that any attempt to turn flesh-and-blood actors into surreal cartoon characters like The Cat in the Hat or The Grinch wouldn’t work, and would likely damage his brand. We all have vivid memories of these works from childhood. Why distort something so pure? When he died, however, his wife, Audrey Geisel, essentially auctioned the books off to the highest Hollywood bidders. The first result is Ron Howard’s How the Grinch Stole Christmas, starring a nearly unrecognizable Jim Carrey in the lead role. It’s an aggressively ugly movie that drains all the warmth and joy out of the source material. When a similarly deranged Mike Myers Cat in the Hat movie crapped out three years later, Hollywood’s misguided experiment with live-action Dr. Seuss movies ended. Ron Howard, meanwhile, had many misfires this century, including The Dilemma, Hillbilly Elegy , and Angels and Demons , but none of them miss the mark quite like How the Grinch Stole Christmas. Every remaining copy of this film should be banished from the Earth. This character should exist only on the page or in animated form. Dr. Seuss was right. 

‘She’s Having a Baby’ (John Hughes)

Unlike many great directors on this list, John Hughes walked away from his career long before he became an old man chasing past glories. He was a mere 41 when his final film, Curly Sue , hit theaters in 1991. And although Curly Sue is not a great film by any means, he made a worse one at the height of his creativity in 1988, sandwiched between Planes, Trains, and Automobiles and Uncle Buck . We’re referring to the Kevin Bacon/Elizabeth McGovern romantic comedy She’s Having a Baby. As the title suggests, it’s about a young married couple struggling with impending parenthood. But the two leads had little chemistry, and the film is remarkably bland, especially when compared with every other film Hughes made in the Eighties. The movie’s only redeeming quality is that it makes the Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon game quite easy since about 85 percent of Hollywood has lighting-fast cameos during the credit sequence. 

‘Amsterdam’ (David O. Russell)

When news of David O. Russell’s Amsterdam hit the trades, there was a real sense of excitement in the cinephile community. O. Russell has a largely impeccable filmography thanks to Flirting With Disaster, Three Kings, The Fighter , and Silving Linings Playbook. And for Amsterdam , he assembled an absolutely enormous cast of A-listers that included Christian Bale, Margot Robbie, John David Washington, Chris Rock, Anya Taylor-Joy, Zoe Saldaña, Mike Myers, Michael Shannon, Rami Malek, and Robert De Niro. (He also created a role for Taylor Swift, which should have been a red flag considering her other movies are Cats, The Giver, and Valentine’s Day. ) It’s a convoluted mystery film that takes place largely in the 1930s, centered around three friends trying to figure out who killed a prominent general. “It takes well over an hour before Amsterdam decides what it wants to be,” wrote James Berardinelli of ReelViews, “and, by that time, viewers may be exasperated by the film’s quirkiness and exhausted by its meandering, unfocused storyline.”

‘Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace’ (George Lucas)

The first Star Wars prequel poses many questions: Did we really need to meet Darth Vader as a nine-year-old? Did they really think moviegoers would be charmed by the antics of Jar Jar Binks? Why is Anakin’s slave master a flying insect with an Israeli accent and a nose straight out of Nazi propaganda cartoons? What’s this midi-chlorian bullshit? We waited 16 endless years for this? To be clear, the prequels got better as they went along. The third one is actually pretty great. And the sequel trilogy is so abysmal, especially the most recent movie, that this one is actually somewhat solid by comparison. But George Lucas didn’t direct the newer ones. He did direct Phantom Menace .

‘Piranha II: The Spawning’ (James Cameron)

It’s not exactly fair to blame James Cameron for the unholy mess that is 1982’s Piranha II: The Spawning. It was his first motion picture. The budget was miniscule. He had nothing to do with the ridiculous screenplay about flying piranhas. And most importantly, he wasn’t the one calling the shots. Italian producer Ovidio G. Assonitis had final say over every decision, and only credited Cameron as the director for contractual reasons. Cameron also had little to do with the final edit. But he was on set the entire time and is credited as the sole director, so we’re going to count it. (He followed it up with a little movie called The Terminator . He was fully in charge of that one. The results speak for themselves.) 

‘Planet of the Apes’ (Tim Burton)

The original Planet of the Apes from 1968 is a masterpiece of science fiction. The franchise of films reimagining the original that starting in 2011 was shockingly great. But there was another Planet of the Apes movie back in 2001 directed by Tim Burton that most people would love to forget. It stars Mark Wahlberg in the Charlton Heston role as an astronaut who finds himself marooned on a planet ruled by humanoid apes. Expectations were very high for the project because Burton was in the director’s chair, and he was coming off a very successful run of films in the Nineties, including Batman Returns, Edward Scissorhands , and Ed Wood . Those were amazing movies. Planet of the Apes , sadly, was an incomprehensible mess. The only thing most people remember about it is the insane ending where Wahlberg comes back to present-day America and finds that it’s ruled by apes, complete with an ape Abraham Lincoln statue in the Lincoln Memorial. A sequel was supposed to explain this, but it never got made. To be clear, Burton made many terrible movies after Planet of the Apes , including Dark Shadows and Dumbo, but none of them fail on a level nearly as grandiose as Planet of the Apes .

‘Psycho’ (Gus Van Sant)

After Good Will Hunting , Gus Van Sant could have directed anything he wanted. Nobody was saying no to him at this point. For reasons that remain impossible to understand, he took this invaluable Hollywood chip and cashed it in to create a shot-for-shot remake of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho starring Vince Vaughan as Norman Bates. And we mean “shot for shot” in the most literal way possible. He re-created every single camera angle and line of dialogue from the 1960 horror classic in the most precise way possible. Why on Earth did he think there was demand for such a thing? The original exists. It’s perfect. You can repaint Vincent van Gogh’s “Sunflowers” for fun. But no art museum is going to display it. It’s just an interesting novelty. This new version of Psycho is no different. 

‘Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull’ (Steven Spielberg)

At a key moment in Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park , Jeff Goldbum’s character explains why the dinosaur theme park isn’t a very good idea. “Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could,” he said, “they didn’t stop to think if they should.” Spielberg should have applied this lesson to himself when he succumbed to years of pressure in 2008 and made a fourth Indiana Jones movie. The third one ended beautifully with Indiana Jones and his father literally riding off together into the sunset. When the story resumes two decades later, it’s 1957 and Jones discovers he has a teenage son, played by Shia LaBeouf. They travel to Peru, trailed by Soviet spies, and eventually come across ancient aliens in a temple. Once the thrill of seeing our old friend Indy after all these years washes away, it becomes clear this just isn’t a very compelling story. (We didn’t even mention the moment where Indy survives a nuclear blast in a refrigerator.) The fifth movie was arguably even worse, but Spielberg had the good sense to pass the directing baton to James Mangold for that one. In a better world, only the first three movies would exist. 

‘North’ (Rob Reiner)

Roger Ebert wrote thousands of reviews during his long career as a film critic. But in an odd twist of fate, the one quoted most often these days is a review of the wretched 1995 Rob Reiner/Elijah Wood movie North , which is about a young boy traveling across the country to meet prospective parents. “I hated this movie,” he wrote. “Hated hated hated hated hated this movie. Hated it. Hated every simpering stupid vacant audience-insulting moment of it. Hated the sensibility that thought anyone would like it. Hated the implied insult to the audience by its belief that anyone would be entertained by it … ‘North’ is a bad film — one of the worst movies ever made. But it is not by a bad filmmaker, and must represent some sort of lapse from which Reiner will recover — possibly sooner than I will.” Rob Reiner did briefly bounce back in 1995 with The American President , but he hasn’t made many great movies over the past three decades. But even the crappiest of the crappy — like Being Charlie , The Magic of Belle Isle , or And So It Goes — can’t compare to the sheer shittiness of North . At least it inspired the name of an Ebert collection of bad reviews titled I Hated, Hated, Hated This Movie.

‘Jack’ (Francis Ford Coppola)

Francis Ford Coppola’s Seventies run of The Godfather, The Conversation, The Godfather II , and Apocalypse Now is probably the greatest four-movie streak in the history of Hollywood. But things took a major turn in the Eighties and Nineties due to high-profile fiascos like The Cotton Club and The Godfather III . By 1996, he was reduced to taking work-for-hire directing jobs like Jack . That’s the unfortunate movie where Robin Williams plays a child whose body grows at four times the normal rate. It’s a decent premise for a serious drama, but this is actually a comedy. He has water-balloon fights with his middle school buddies, buys them porn, and waits for the day he’ll die tragically young. It ends seven years in the future with an elderly Jack delivering a graduation speech, clearly on the verge of death. The movie was a modest box-office hit, but the critics roasted it. It’s only grown worse with age, especially since Bill Cosby plays Jack’s tutor. And whatever one thinks about the movie today, it was certainly beneath the talents of a titan like Coppola. 

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