Part 11 – The Failures
Series Navigation
Part 1: The Masterpieces |
Part 2: The Near Perfect |
Part 3: The Excellent |
Part 4: The Very Good |
Part 5: The Solid Craft |
Part 6: The Dependable |
Part 7: The Watchable |
Part 8: The Flawed |
Part 9: The Mediocre |
Part 10: The Poor |
Part 11: The Failures
This is the bottom of two hundred and nine films and the entries here are rated below zero for a specific reason. There is a difference between a picture that fails to work and one that wastes something or asserts something false, and the negative numbers record the second.
The common failure across the lowest four is a protagonist who is never wrong. Captain Marvel, Quantumania and Love and Thunder all have a lead with nothing to overcome, and Avatar has one who arrives, learns a culture in three months and becomes better at it than the people who were born into it.
Every rating is the one carried by the review it links to. Ties are broken by year, and this is the last of eleven parts.
Captain Marvel is stronger than every antagonist from the first act and Jake Sully outperforms a civilization in three months. Build a limit, using the Protagonist Handbook.
1. Thunderbolts (2025) [full review]
► Read the full review of Thunderbolts (2025)
RLR: 1 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.2/10
"Confirms the franchise crisis extends to the films built to fix it."
Jake Schreier assembled a team from characters the franchise had left unresolved, and the film has a genuine idea underneath it about depression treated as an actual condition instead of a character note. The execution never commits to the idea. Eric Pearson and Joanna Calo share the screenplay credit.
Florence Pugh is the best thing in it and has been the best thing in everything she has done for this franchise. Yelena is exhausted, she is taking contracts because stopping would require her to think, and Pugh plays the fatigue as physical. Sebastian Stan, Wyatt Russell and Hannah John-Kamen fill out the team.
The Void is the film’s central conceit and the most interesting visual material Marvel has produced in years. A man who erases people into a shadow, a shared mental space built from memories nobody wants to revisit, and a resolution that happens through presence instead of force.
The problem is that the film keeps undercutting its own register. Every scene approaching genuine weight is followed by a joke, the team dynamic is assembled from familiar components, and the picture cannot decide whether it is serious about what it is about. Lewis Pullman plays Bob and Julia Louis-Dreyfus returns as Valentina.
It took under four hundred million dollars against a budget around one hundred and eighty and was treated as a disappointment. The retitling to The New Avengers in marketing midway through the campaign was the clearest signal of the studio’s own confidence. Son Lux scored it and Andrew Droz Palermo shot it.
2. Ironheart (2025) [full review]
► Read the full review of Ironheart (2025)
RLR: 1 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 5.2/10
"A good setup and a series that will not stay with it."
Chinaka Hodge created a six-episode series about Riri Williams, introduced in Wakanda Forever three years earlier, and it arrived to almost no attention after a long delay. Disney released it in two batches across a single week. Ryan Coogler executive produced and the series was shot in 2022.
Dominique Thorne is good and the series gives her a genuinely interesting problem. Riri is brilliant, broke, expelled and grieving, and the early episodes about building something in a Chicago garage with stolen parts have real texture. Anthony Ramos plays Parker Robbins and Alden Ehrenreich appears as well.
The magic and technology collision is the actual premise and the series cannot decide what it thinks. Parker Robbins has a hood powered by something supernatural, Riri builds with engineering, and the show sets up a contrast it never develops into an argument. Six episodes were released in two batches across a single week.
The Mephisto reveal at the end is a franchise obligation arriving in a show that had no room for it. Six episodes of a character study close on a setup for a cosmic antagonist the series never earned and cannot pay off. Sam Bailey and Angela Barnes directed three episodes each.
Black Widow stages risks for a character the audience watched die two years earlier. Find the question a prequel can still ask, in the Conflict and Tension Handbook.
3. Black Widow (2021) [full review]
► Read the full review of Black Widow (2021)
RLR: 0 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 6.7/10
"A solo film arriving after the character was already dead."
Cate Shortland made a solo film for a character who had died two years earlier in Endgame, set between two previous pictures, and released it to cinemas and streaming on the same day during the pandemic. The lawsuit that followed was settled privately. Eric Pearson wrote the screenplay and Shortland had made Lore and Berlin Syndrome.
The family material is genuinely good and belongs in a better film. Florence Pugh, David Harbour and Rachel Weisz as a fabricated Soviet family who have to sit at a dinner table and account for what they were, and all three are excellent in it.
The structural problem is that nothing in it can matter. Natasha is dead, the film is set in the past, and every risk the picture stages is one the audience knows she survives. The entire running time is a completed sentence being diagrammed. Ray Winstone plays Dreykov and O-T Fagbenle appears as a contact.
The Red Room sequence is well staged and the free-fall collapse is genuinely inventive. The film has the elements of a spy picture and the structure of an obligation, and the Pugh material is the only thing in it the franchise actually used afterward. It took over three hundred and seventy million dollars during the pandemic.
4. Battlefield Earth (2000) [full review]
► Read the full review of Battlefield Earth (2000)
RLR: -1 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 2.5/10
"The most completely failed science fiction film ever made."
John Travolta spent years developing an adaptation of L. Ron Hubbard’s novel and eventually financed a substantial portion personally. It took around thirty million dollars against a budget near seventy-five and won seven Razzies, including a later award for the worst film of the decade.
Almost every shot is tilted. The cinematographer and director have both confirmed the choice was deliberate, applied across almost the entire running time, and the effect is a film that appears to have been assembled by somebody who has never watched one. Corey Mandell and J. David Shapiro wrote the screenplay.
The Psychlos are photographed from below through blue filters with dreadlocks and platform boots, and Travolta plays Terl as a bored middle manager, the one interpretive decision in the film with any wit in it. Roger Christian directed and had been art director on the first Star Wars.
The plot requires a thousand-year-old interstellar empire to be defeated by men who learn to fly Harrier jets in about a week, using aircraft that have been sitting in a hangar for a millennium and start on the first attempt. Barry Pepper and Forest Whitaker appear alongside Travolta.
Love and Thunder has a dying woman and a grieving father and will not stay in either scene for a minute. Learn when the jokes stop, in the Showing and Telling Handbook.
5. She-Hulk: Attorney at Law (2022) [full review]
► Read the full review of She-Hulk: Attorney at Law (2022)
RLR: -1 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 5.1/10
"One of the worst series ever made, and the premise was workable."
Jessica Gao created a nine-episode legal comedy with Tatiana Maslany, adapted loosely from John Byrne’s run, and the fourth-wall material comes directly from the source. The series is the most divisive thing Marvel has produced for television. Kat Coiro directed six episodes and Anu Valia directed three.
Maslany is excellent and the premise is genuinely good. A lawyer who can already control the transformation, a superhuman law practice, and a comedy about a woman being asked to be a symbol when she wants to litigate. Mark Ruffalo, Tim Roth and Benedict Wong appear across the run.
The series answers its critics inside the fiction repeatedly, the decision that divided people most. Online abuse is dramatized, the responses are voiced by characters, and the finale has the protagonist break into the studio to rewrite her own ending. Amie Doherty scored it and Disney released it weekly in 2022.
That finale is either the best or worst thing in it depending entirely on the viewer. It is genuinely inventive, it is also a series stopping to argue with its audience, and it resolves the actual plot in about ninety seconds afterward. Byrne’s run began in 1989 and established the fourth-wall material.
6. Avatar (2009) [full review]
► Read the full review of Avatar (2009)
RLR: -100 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.9/10
"A white savior story wearing environmental progressivism."
Cameron spent around two hundred and thirty-seven million dollars and over a decade waiting for the technology, and the film took more than two and nine tenths billion dollars. The performance capture and the stereoscopic photography were both genuine advances. Sam Worthington, Zoe Saldana and Sigourney Weaver lead the cast.
The Pandora design work is the achievement and it is substantial. A bioluminescent biosphere with a stated biological logic, floating mountains, a neural network connecting every organism, and a production that employed botanists and linguists to build it out. Mauro Fiore won the Academy Award for cinematography.
The story is Dances with Wolves and the film does not disguise it. An outsider arrives, learns the culture, is accepted, and becomes better at being one of them than the people born into it, the specific thing the structure is built to deliver. Cameron has acknowledged the debt in interviews.
Jake Sully rides the toruk after five previous riders in the planet’s entire recorded history, and the film presents this as the achievement that unites the clans. A man who has been there three months accomplishes what the culture managed five times in centuries. Paul Frommer constructed the Na’vi language with a full grammar.
The dialogue is functional at best and the antagonists are drawn without any complication at all. Quaritch has no position beyond aggression, Selfridge has no argument beyond profit, and nothing in the film requires the audience to weigh anything. James Horner scored it and it won three Academy Awards in total.
Quantumania moves a premise built on contrast into a rendered world with nothing to contrast against. Test the setting against the concept in the World Builder’s Handbook.
7. Thor: Love and Thunder (2022) [full review]
► Read the full review of Thor: Love and Thunder (2022)
RLR: -100 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 6.2/10
"One of the worst films ever made, and it had a great villain in it."
Waititi returned after Ragnarok with substantially more improvisational freedom and the result demonstrates what the previous film’s discipline had been doing. The comedy is constant, the tone never settles, and nothing in it is permitted to be serious for a full scene. Waititi wrote it with Jennifer Kaytin Robinson.
Christian Bale’s Gorr is a genuinely excellent antagonist in a film with no room for him. A man whose child dies while he prays, who meets his god and finds him contemptuous, and who concludes that gods should not exist. The opening ten minutes are the best in it.
Natalie Portman’s return and the cancer material should carry the picture. Jane is dying, the hammer is accelerating it, and she is choosing the transformation knowing what it costs. The film keeps interrupting this for screaming goats. Portman trained for ten months and the Mighty Thor material comes from Jason Aaron’s run.
The Omnipotence City sequence is where the register fully collapses. Russell Crowe plays Zeus with an accent as a sustained joke, a genuine theological argument about gods abandoning their worshippers is raised, and the scene resolves in a toga gag. Tessa Thompson and Chris Pratt appear alongside Hemsworth.
The children’s army at the end is the clearest symptom. Gorr’s argument is that gods do nothing for those who pray, and the film answers by arming a group of abducted children with Asgardian weapons for a battle sequence. Michael Giacchino and Nami Melumad scored it together.
She-Hulk spends its finale arguing with its own audience and resolves the plot in ninety seconds afterward. Protect the ending, using the Plot Handbook.
8. Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania (2023) [full review]
► Read the full review of Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania (2023)
RLR: -100 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 6.1/10
"The entry that confirmed the phase was not going to recover."
Peyton Reed returned for a third film that abandons the scale comedy the sub-series was built on and relocates everything to a rendered quantum realm. It is the lowest-grossing entry in the sequence and the reception effectively ended the sub-series. Jeff Loveness wrote the screenplay and Reed directed all three films.
Jonathan Majors is genuinely good as Kang and the performance is the only thing holding the picture together. He is quiet, he is tired, and the scene where he explains what he did to his own multiverse is the one moment the film earns anything.
The visual environment is the central problem. Almost every frame is generated, the quantum realm has no scale reference, and a franchise built on the contrast between a man and a bedroom carpet has removed the one thing that made it legible. Michael Douglas, Michelle Pfeiffer and Evangeline Lilly return.
The Modok decision is indefensible on any reading. Darren Cross returns as a rendered head with a human face mapped onto it, played for comedy, and the film asks the audience to accept a redemption for the character in the last ten minutes. Bill Murray appears briefly in the second act.
Kathryn Newton’s Cassie is given the emotional throughline and no room to use it. She has spent five years without her father, she has built something, and the film has too much multiversal exposition to spend any time on either. Christophe Beck returned for the score and Bill Pope shot it.
9. Captain Marvel (2019) [full review]
► Read the full review of Captain Marvel (2019)
RLR: -1000 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 6.8/10
"The lowest rating on the site, and the reason is structural."
Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck made a film that took over one and one tenth billion dollars and it sits at the bottom of this ranking for a structural reason instead of a political one. The protagonist has nothing to overcome at any point in the running time.
Carol Danvers begins the film more powerful than every antagonist she meets and the picture never establishes a limit. The memory suppression is presented as the obstacle, removing it is the arc, and the resolution is a character discovering she was always sufficient. Boden and Fleck wrote it with Geneva Robertson-Dworet.
The photon sequence at the end is the clearest demonstration. She destroys a fleet without difficulty, the sequence is staged as triumph, and nothing in the preceding two hours required her to acquire a capability, make a sacrifice or change a position. Jude Law plays Yon-Rogg and Annette Bening the Supreme Intelligence.
The Skrull reversal is the best idea in the film and arrives too late to reorganize anything. Ben Mendelsohn’s Talos is a refugee instead of an invader, the performance is warm and funny, and the reveal reframes a conflict the picture had treated as settled.
The nineties setting and the Nick Fury material are both well handled. Samuel L. Jackson de-aged across a full film is the most convincing sustained work of its kind, and the buddy structure is the only place the picture relaxes. Pinar Toprak scored it and was the first woman to score a Marvel film.
Honorable Mentions: Action Films Without a Review Here Yet
No review on the site for any of these so far. Every one of them is better than anything above and each is on the list.
The Villainess (2017)
Jung Byung-gil opens with a ten-minute first-person corridor assault shot as a single apparent take, and the motorcycle sword fight at the end is performed with the camera rigged to the bike. The plot cannot match the staging.
Furie (2019)
Veronica Ngo plays a former gangster whose daughter is taken by traffickers, and the Vovinam choreography is shot in long takes on real Saigon locations. The train fight is the sequence everybody cites.
Headshot (2016)
Timo Tjahjanto and Kimo Stamboel gave Iko Uwais amnesia and a hospital full of people trying to correct it. The bus sequence and the police station assault are both genuinely punishing.
Kung Fu Jungle (2014)
Donnie Yen plays an imprisoned instructor helping police catch a man killing martial arts masters in order of discipline. The premise turns the tournament structure into a procedural and the final fight happens in traffic.
The Man from Nowhere (2010)
Won Bin plays a pawnshop owner whose only connection is a neighbour child, and the knife fight in the last act is choreographed around close-quarters technique instead of spectacle. It was the highest-grossing Korean film of its year.
Confidential Assignment (2017)
A North Korean detective and a South Korean one forced to work a case together, and the film uses the political difference as comedy and as genuine friction. The parking garage sequence is well staged.
Veteran (2015)
Ryoo Seung-wan built a police film around a detective pursuing the son of a conglomerate family, and the class argument underneath it is what made it one of the highest-grossing Korean films ever released.
The Roundup (2022)
Ma Dong-seok plays a detective whose entire method is walking toward people and hitting them, and the film is honest that this is the appeal. The bus sequence is the best thing in the series.
Extreme Job (2019)
A narcotics unit opens a fried chicken restaurant as surveillance cover and the restaurant becomes successful, the best comic premise in Korean cinema. The final fight is genuinely well choreographed.
Believer (2018)
A Korean remake of Drug War, with a detective and an informant working toward a trafficker nobody has seen. The mute siblings and the factory sequence are the material the original did not have.
The Villain’s Assistant (2023)
A Chinese comedy about a low-ranking henchman in a martial arts world, built on the same joke as Kung Fu Hustle and committed to it completely. The final sequence earns the sincerity it reaches for.
Operation Red Sea (2018)
Dante Lam made a Chinese naval extraction film with combat staging closer to Black Hawk Down than to anything commercial. The sandstorm tank sequence is the largest thing in it and almost entirely practical.
Dishonorable Mentions: Action Films That Failed
Also unreviewed here, and each belongs on this page. Premises worth the budget, lost somewhere between the pitch and the edit.
The Great Wall (2016)
Zhang Yimou made the most expensive Chinese production ever mounted and built it around a European mercenary saving a Chinese army from monsters. The color-coded regiments are the only distinctive thing in it.
Mortal Engines (2018)
A premise about cities on wheels consuming each other, delivered with a plot assembled from Star Wars beats. It lost around one hundred and seventy-five million dollars and ended the planned sequence immediately.
Valerian (2017)
Besson spent his own financing on the most expensive European film ever made and cast two leads with no chemistry at all. The market sequence in the first act is extraordinary and nothing after it is.
The Golden Compass (2007)
New Line removed the final three chapters of the novel so the ending would not be bleak, leaving a film that stops instead of concluding. The sequence was cancelled and the rights reverted.
Seventh Son (2014)
Delayed three times across two years while the studio changed hands, and released to a loss of around eighty-five million dollars. Jeff Bridges and Julianne Moore are both in it and neither performance matches the other.
The Warrior’s Way (2010)
An assassin hiding in a frontier town, shot entirely on stages in New Zealand with composited backgrounds throughout. The visual approach never establishes a real space and nothing in the film has weight.
What Do You Think?
The bottom four here share one failure: a protagonist who is never wrong and never lacks anything. That is the whole argument for the negative numbers. Tell me whether a film can be good with a lead who has nothing to overcome.
Continue the Series
Part 1: The Masterpieces |
Part 2: The Near Perfect |
Part 3: The Excellent |
Part 4: The Very Good |
Part 5: The Solid Craft |
Part 6: The Dependable |
Part 7: The Watchable |
Part 8: The Flawed |
Part 9: The Mediocre |
Part 10: The Poor |
Part 11: The Failures