Disappointment is all based on perspective and expectations. The first time I tried the Baconator from Wendy’s, I was extremely disappointed. This was because I love Dave Thomas cheeseburgers, as well as bacon, and adding a lot of each of those elements seemed like it should have created the greatest fast food sandwich ever. In reality, it was just good. There was no special sauce taking it to a new level or hidden ingredient to differentiate it from any other Wendy’s cheeseburgers with bacon. Now that I’m a little more detached from the situation, I’ve realized the Baconator should continue existing. Likewise, some of the films on this list were worth making. Even if they never quite achieved what we expected, they still were good enough to at least entertain us. Then again, some of the films on this list suck. At one point or another, we thought they had something to offer, but in the end, they’ll go down merely as disasters.
Numbering among the entries are a few terrible films, some bad ones, a lot of mediocre efforts and even a few better than average motion pictures. None of them are great. Further, none of them lived up to the hype and anticipation many of us felt before walking into the theater. The how’s and why’s are as varied as the films themselves; so, below each movie’s expected and actual star ratings we’ve included a paragraph explaining exactly where the effort needed improvement.
Get on your thinking caps and get ready to bitch, here are the 10 Most Disappointing Films of 2010…
Tron: Legacy
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You know how CSI dumbs down science as much as possible so as not to exclude anyone, regardless of intelligence level? Well, the original Tron, in many ways, is the exact opposite. It works because it doesn’t give two shits what anyone outside its niche demographic thinks. It brandishes around insider computer lingo and nerdy jargon like there’s a quota to meet, and just when you think it might make a play for the average viewer, it doubles back and gets weirder. That rogue independence, more than anything else, is the spirit of Tron, and it’s a spirit Legacy completely ignores. You can’t spend a hundred and fifty million dollars marketing a cult classic; so, Disney simply made a different film. Yes, the visuals are stunning. Yes, it sometimes works in a way few films worked all year, but Legacy derezes the same viewers who cried out for a sequel in favor of everyone else without any emotional attachment. That’s a disappointment in my book, and with largely mediocre reviews, it would be hard to argue otherwise.
Get Him To The Greek
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Get Him To The Greek is highly entertaining and more than watchable. As comedies go, it's better than average, but with two great comedians, a proven character and a script generating huge internet buzz, many were expecting a horrible, brilliant, amoral classic. Unfortunately because of the way it’s cut together, the individual parts are worth a lot more than the sum. Like a Christopher Guest mockumentary, the camera simply watches. There’s no set-up, set-up, punchline. There’s simply humorous premises that exist somewhere within scenes, but where films like Best In Show cram that extra time with as many clever lines as possible, Get Him To The Greek just sorta hangs out for random lengths of time wondering if people are still on board. By the end, most of us are still on board, we’re just a little tired and annoyed, the same as we would be with an enjoyable dinner guest that outstays his stories.
Knight And Day
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Sitting through Knight And Day was a lot like watching the Minnesota Timberwolves play basketball between the years 2001 and 2007. For all intents and purposes, they were terrible, but because of the sheer unrelenting dominance of Kevin Garnett, they waffled between mediocre and very good, not great. Tom Cruise is Kevin Garnett, only instead of Latrell Sprewell, he has Cameron Diaz, his own lazy sidekick that rarely feels like showing up. When she does, Knight And Day is wonderful, but mostly, it’s just Tom Cruise frantically running back on defense as his filmmaker and supporting cast turn the ball over repeatedly. There was a lot of talk about Aldous Snow finally getting his own spin-off film (it made this list). If there’s one character this year I’d like to see again, it’s Cruise’s Roy Miller. Too bad the Celtics don’t have room under the salary cap.
Clash Of The Titans
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Like The Hangover and The Dark Knight, the amazing trailer for Clash Of The Titans sparked an astounding level of interest, though neither of those films prompted their lead actors to later apologize. How the hell does anything go that South that quickly? With below-average special effects and 3D, as well as a script that left something to be desired, Clash Of The Titans was hardly the spectacle the trailer promised. If you’re going to do a movie about Gods, it needs to be epic, not passable at parts. Liam Neeson shouting “release the Kraken” was epic, Sam Worthington pretending to fish was passable at parts. Don’t worry though, with almost 500 million in world wide grosses, there’ll be at least one more chance to get things right. Hooray?
The Tourist
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Let’s be honest: expectations were already starting to wane before anyone saw The Tourist, but even those lower estimates never stooped to mediocre enough levels. The Tourist is Johnny Depp at his most hapless since Edward Scissorhands and Jolie at her most unattainably aloof since Wanted The combination works about as well as peanut butter and sausage gravy, nails and a chalkboard or Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck and big budget, English-language event films. Sometimes one scene eliciting conflicting emotions is a good thing (see Royal Tenenbaums; sometimes it’s just off-putting (see this pile of mediocrity). The result isn’t all together horrible, it’s just more puzzling, like seeing a talented artist put his own spin on a color by number without ever breaking the rules. Apparently, this is the sort of thing the Globes are into though. So, by that standard, what a raging success!
The Bounty Hunter
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I don’t expect a lot from a run of the mill romantic comedy. Half a dozen or so laughs, a few cute plot lines, an entertaining courtship and a heartwarming conclusion. Run of the mill romantic comedy is exactly what The Bounty Hunter should have been; instead, it goes beyond any reasonable level of awful. It’s terrible. So terrible in fact, that’ it cannot even be enjoyed played on basic cable as a background to whatever else you might be doing. None of the characters are likeable, and it’s unclear why they ever would be attracted to each other to begin with. It just makes no goddamn sense. Everything about this film screams average romantic comedy. From Jennifer Aniston to Gerard Butler to a plot about a bounty hunter picking up his ex-wife, this thing seemed fast tracked to max out at slightly better than average from inception. No such luck.
Due Date
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Zach Galifianakis entered Due Date hot off The Hangover. Robert Downey Jr. stepped on to the set straight off being, well, amazing in nearly everything he’s ever done. There was reason to expect some sort of comedy magic here. The trailers made it look like a new riff on Planes, Trains, and Automobiles and maybe that sounded good. What we didn’t’ know was that it was more a straight-up ripoff of Planes, Trains, and Automobiles only without any of the John Hughes magic and heart. Zach Galifianakis basically played his character from The Hangover only less sympathetic and gayer. Robert Downey Jr. played the most unlikeable man to appear in a comedy all year, the kind of guy who punches kids in the gut whenever he’s slightly annoyed by them. Making an entertaining road trip movie should have been a slam dunk for Todd Phillips, who incidentally directed a much funnier movie actually called Road Trip. I guess he used up all his good jokes on that one.
Iron Man 2
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If we’re honest with ourselves, we’ll all admit that the original Iron Man never really had the greatest story. The first half really worked, but once Tony Stark got down to fighting bad guys, the script never truly worked. None of that mattered. Robert Downey Jr. was so good and director Jon Favreau seemed to be having so much fun with the material, that we all had fun with it too. That should have made the sequel impossible to screw up. After all they’d already proven that they could make a great movie even with a mediocre script. In fact there was reason to expect that Iron Man 2 would be an even better movie. With all that origin stuff out of the way they were sure to write a better story this time around, combine that with everything that went right in the first film Iron Man 2 could have been a success of Dark Knight proportions. It wasn’t. They didn’t. Batman this isn’t. Actually the script, against all odds, got a lot worse and Favreau’s love for the franchise was dimmed when he was forced to turn the whole thing into a big advertisement for upcoming Marvel projects against his will. Thank god for Scarlett Johansson in her ass-kicking spandex or the sequel would have been nearly unwatchable.
It's Kind Of A Funny Story
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Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck had made two searing, low-budget independent dramas with Half-Nelson and Sugar, and seemed to be moving confidently into mainstream filmmaking with It's Kind Of A Funny Story, an adaptation of Ned Vizzini's memoir about a kid accidentally checked into an adult mental ward. And while there are moments of the movie that work, most of them involving Zach Galifianakis or the points where they directly reference all the previous teen comedies they were influenced by, for the most part It's Kind Of A Funny Story is a mess of different tones and comedic beats, feeling for all the world like the kind of generic comedy Fleck and Boden are definitely better than. When telling their own stories they were so confident and fearless, but when taking on someone else's memoir and the format of a classical Hollywood comedy, they totally tripped over their own talented feet. Here's hoping they're still ultimately destined for better things.
Sex and the City 2
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In retrospect the movie deserved even a worse rating, for completely trashing the legacy of a show that deserved far more credit than it ever got, and for turning the characters beloved over a decade's worth of TV reruns into gross, bedazzled caricatures of their former selves. Sex and the City 2 started by making the brutal mistake of relocating the action from New York to Abu Dhabi, but then proceeded to indulge in every nasty stereotype about both privileged, American women and the way a Middle Eastern nation might react to sexually liberated females. It's not just that it was a bad movie, but that it proved right every mistaken notion anyone had about the Sex and the City franchise being nothing but shallow, rich women whining about their ordinary problems in the face of actual issues in the world. Everyone who has ever a fan of the franchise had to be ashamed, but hopefully the people behind this debacle hung their heads even lower.
