Part 4 – The Very Good
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
The best decision in this tier is Aliens, and it’s a decision about what not to do. Scott made a horror film about isolation and Cameron made a war film about numbers, and refusing to compete with the original on its own terms is why both survive.
The other recurring strength here’s satire delivered straight. RoboCop’s boardroom demonstration is funnier because nobody in the room finds it funny, and Demolition Man builds a sanitized future that turned out to be more accurate than anybody intended.
Every film in this tier gives me a good time, and every one of them has a flaw that keeps it out of the top three parts. I’m fine with that. A movie that swings hard and misses once is more fun to me than a polished one that never swings at all, and what I admire most here is how many of these pictures picked a lane and stayed in it when the easy money pointed somewhere else.
Every rating is the one carried by the review it links to. Ties are broken by year, and this is the fourth of eleven parts.
Aliens refuses to remake Alien and changes genre instead, so both films survive. Decide what not to repeat, using the Plot Handbook.
1. The Incredible Hulk (2008) [full review]
► Read the full review of The Incredible Hulk (2008)
RLR: 8.5 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 6.6/10
"The forgotten Marvel film, and it is a monster movie instead of a superhero one."
Louis Leterrier made the second attempt in five years and Marvel has spent the time since excluding it from its own retrospectives. Edward Norton rewrote considerably, fought the studio over the cut, and was replaced before The Avengers without much ceremony. Zak Penn wrote the credited screenplay and Norton reworked it considerably.
The opening credits are the smartest decision in the picture. The entire origin is delivered in about three minutes of montage over titles, with gamma equipment, a failed test and a flight to Brazil, so the film never has to stage a story the audience already knew.
The Rocinha sequence is the best action in it. Soldiers pursue Banner across favela rooftops before any transformation happens, shot on real locations, and the tension comes from a man who can’t afford to be frightened trying not to become something. Liv Tyler plays Betty Ross and William Hurt plays her father.
Tim Roth’s Emil Blonsky is a soldier who wants what Banner has and the film is unusually clear about why. He’s aging out of the only thing he’s good at, the serum is a promotion, and the Abomination is a man who asked for it instead of an accident. The last act is a fight between two large digital creatures in Harlem and it’s where the picture stops working. Everything preceding it’s built on restraint and pursuit, and the resolution abandons both for a spectacle the film had no interest in until that point.
The Incredible Hulk deserves better than the silent treatment Marvel gives it.
I enjoy the first two thirds enormously, especially Norton running across those rooftops trying not to lose his temper, and Roth’s soldier who wants the serum is a smarter villain than the genre usually bothers with. Then it turns into two cartoons punching each other in Harlem and my attention wanders. I’d have cut that fight in half and kept Banner running.
2. The Avengers (2012) [full review]
► Read the full review of The Avengers (2012)
RLR: 8.5 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 8.0/10
"Proved interconnected franchise cinema could work at scale."
Joss Whedon was handed the structural problem nobody had solved: assembling six protagonists from five films into one picture without any of them becoming furniture. He wrote and directed it and it took over one and a half billion dollars. Zak Penn shares the story credit and Whedon rewrote the screenplay entirely.
The helicarrier argument is the sequence that makes the film work. Every character states their objection to every other character, the scene runs several minutes with no action in it, and the tension of the second half depends entirely on that conversation having happened. Alan Silvestri scored it and had written the Captain America march the year before.
Loki is a deliberately small antagonist and the film understands why that’s correct. His actual plan is to be captured, the army is borrowed, and his function is to give six people who dislike each other a reason to be in the same building. The single-take shot through the New York battle is the technical achievement. The camera moves from Iron Man to Captain America to Hulk to Thor to Hawkeye to Black Widow in one continuous move, solving in thirty seconds a problem the film had spent two hours on.
The dialogue is the reason it holds up better than most of what followed. Whedon gives every character a distinct rhythm, nobody speaks in the same tone, and the jokes come out of position instead of being distributed evenly across the cast. It was shot largely in Cleveland and Albuquerque instead of New York.
3. Captain America: The Winter Soldier (2014) [full review]
► Read the full review of Captain America: The Winter Soldier (2014)
RLR: 8.5 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.8/10
"A seventies conspiracy thriller wearing a superhero costume."
The Russo brothers made a seventies paranoid thriller inside a superhero franchise and cast Robert Redford in it to make the reference explicit. The plot concerns an intelligence agency compromised from inside since before anybody currently working there was born. Markus and McFeely wrote it and Henry Jackman scored it.
The elevator fight changed Marvel’s approach to action permanently. Confined space, a countable number of opponents, no cutting away, and Steve Rogers asking the room whether anybody wants to get out first. It’s staged as a thriller sequence instead of spectacle. Anthony Mackie joins as Sam Wilson and Emily VanCamp as Sharon Carter.
The film’s argument about pre-emptive surveillance is unusually direct for a studio picture. Three helicarriers designed to identify threats before they act, algorithmically, using data nobody consented to provide, and Nick Fury presents it as security while the film disagrees with him. Sebastian Stan signed a nine-picture contract for the part in 2010.
The Winter Soldier himself is barely a character and is a weapon with a face the protagonist recognizes. That works for one film, and the franchise spent five more trying to convert him into a person with mixed results. It took over seven hundred million dollars worldwide.
4. Death Wish (1974-1994) [full review]
► Read the full review of Death Wish (1974-1994)
RLR: 8 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.0/10
"Five films across two decades, and only the first is uncertain about anything."
Michael Winner’s 1974 film is a considerably more uncomfortable piece of work than its reputation allows. Paul Kersey is an architect and a conscientious objector who becomes a killer, and the film doesn’t present the transformation as a recovery. Sidney Lumet was attached at one point before Winner took over.
The first picture never lets the vigilantism be satisfying. Kersey vomits after the first shooting, the police know what he’s doing and choose not to stop him for political reasons, and the ending is a man relocating to another city to continue. Jeff Goldblum makes his first screen appearance as one of the attackers.
Brian Garfield wrote the novel as an argument against exactly what the film became and spent years objecting to the adaptation. He wrote a sequel, Death Sentence, to correct the record, and it was eventually filmed in 2007. Herbie Hancock scored the first film and the music is nothing like the reputation.
The four sequels progressively remove everything that made the original defensible. By Death Wish 3 in 1985 Kersey is defending a housing block with a belt-fed machine gun and the film is played as comedy, a long way from a man being sick in an alley.
The first Death Wish is a harder movie than its reputation, and I respect it for making Kersey sick after he pulls the trigger. The sequels are where I lose interest. Once the cost disappears, the series turns into a cartoon about a man with a machine gun, and Garfield had every right to be furious about what his book became.
The Avengers spends several minutes on an argument before anybody cooperates, and Open Range spends an hour on cooking. Set up the payoff in the Conflict and Tension Handbook.
5. Tron (1982) [full review]
► Read the full review of Tron (1982)
RLR: 8 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 6.7/10
"The foundational computer graphics film, and it was disqualified from an effects award for using a computer."
Steven Lisberger spent around seventeen million dollars and was disqualified from the visual effects Academy Award because the Academy considered using computers to be cheating. The film contains roughly fifteen minutes of computer-generated imagery, more than anything before it. Jeff Bridges, Bruce Boxleitner and David Warner lead the cast.
The backlit animation is what most people remember and almost nobody realizes. The glowing circuitry on the costumes was hand-painted onto thousands of individual photographic cels, frame by frame, by a team in Taiwan and Korea working for months. Syd Mead and Jean Giraud both worked on the design.
The light cycle sequence is the image the film gave the culture. Right angles only, walls left behind, and a geometry so clean that it’s been reproduced in games, advertising and design for four decades without needing any explanation. Wendy Carlos scored it, twelve years after A Clockwork Orange.
The story is the weak element and the film knows it. A programmer is digitized into a system where programs worship their users, the film states the theology more than it explores it, and the human material outside the computer is thin. A sequel arrived in 2010 and a third film in 2025.
6. The Terminator (1984) [full review]
► Read the full review of The Terminator (1984)
RLR: 8 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 8.1/10
"Structured as a slasher and sold as an action film for forty years."
Cameron made it for six and a half million dollars and the constraint shaped everything. The Terminator is mostly Schwarzenegger in a leather jacket because the stop-motion endoskeleton was too expensive to use for more than a few minutes of the running time. Lance Henriksen was considered for the title part before Schwarzenegger.
The structure is a horror film with a science fiction premise. Sarah Connor is a waitress being hunted, the police don’t believe her, and the antagonist can’t be reasoned with, stopped or outrun. Cameron has acknowledged the debt to Halloween directly. Stan Winston built the endoskeleton and the practical head effects.
The time loop is closed and the film states it without making a point of it.
Kyle Reese is John Connor’s father, the chip recovered from the first machine causes Cyberdyne, and nothing that happens prevents anything. None of the characters work this out. Gale Anne Hurd produced it and co-wrote the screenplay with Cameron.
Linda Hamilton’s arc is why the sequel had anywhere to go. Sarah is frightened and useless for an hour, and the last twenty minutes are her assembling competence out of necessity. A different person delivers the final line into a tape recorder. Harlan Ellison was credited after a settlement over two Outer Limits episodes.
7. Aliens (1986) [full review]
► Read the full review of Aliens (1986)
RLR: 8 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 8.4/10
"It does not compete with the original. That is why both survive."
Cameron refused to remake Scott’s film and made a different genre with the same creatures. Alien is a haunted house picture about isolation and Aliens is a combat film about numbers, and the decision not to compete on the original’s terms is why both of them survive. The marines are established as overconfident on purpose. They joke about the assignment, they dismiss the briefing, they’re carrying more firepower than anybody could need, and the collapse in the atmosphere processor matters because the audience has watched them assume it couldn’t happen. The motion tracker is the best suspense device in the film and it works because it supplies incomplete information. The audience knows something is approaching and doesn’t know from where, and the sequence where the readings are inside the room is built entirely on that gap.
Sigourney Weaver was nominated for Best Actress, an outcome this kind of picture almost never gets, and the second half justifies the nomination. Ripley’s relationship with Newt is the film’s actual engine and the loader fight at the end is its statement. Cameron wrote it while waiting for The Terminator to be financed.
Stan Winston built the queen as a fourteen-foot puppet worked by several people from inside and below, and the practical work is why the last act still reads as physically present. Almost nothing in the film was achieved by removing weight from the frame. Michael Biehn, Bill Paxton and Lance Henriksen fill out the principal cast.
Aliens is enormous fun, and turning it into a war film was the smartest call Cameron could have made.
Ripley and Newt give it a heart I didn’t expect from a combat picture. My reservation is the marines in the first act, who are so loud and so pleased with themselves that I’m half rooting for the creatures before the atmosphere processor goes wrong. It’s deliberate, and it’s still a miscalculation.
8. RoboCop (1987) [full review]
► Read the full review of RoboCop (1987)
RLR: 8 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.6/10
"Satire works best delivered with a straight face."
Verhoeven read the script, threw it away, and was persuaded to reconsider by his wife, who pointed out what it was doing underneath the violence. It cost around thirteen million dollars and the satire is the reason it survives while its imitators didn’t. Edward Neumeier and Michael Miner wrote the original screenplay.
The ED-209 boardroom demonstration is the film’s whole method in ninety seconds. A machine kills a junior executive during a sales presentation, the room’s response is managerial instead of horrified, and nobody in the scene finds any of it funny. Kurtwood Smith plays Clarence Boddicker and Ronny Cox the executive.
Peter Weller trained with a mime for months to build the movement and the suit was difficult enough to work in that he lost significant weight during production. The performance is almost entirely jaw, mouth and posture. Basil Poledouris scored it and the main theme became the series signature.
The advertisements between scenes carry the political argument. A board game about nuclear war, a car that can’t stop, a hospital with a pricing structure. The plot proceeds while the film makes its case in material the audience treats as background. It was submitted to the ratings board eleven times before it cleared.
Murphy’s reconstruction is the emotional spine and the film handles it with real restraint. He walks through his own empty house, the memories arrive as fragments, and the last line is a man saying his own name after a hundred minutes of not having one.
RoboCop is savage and funny, and those fake commercials make me laugh harder than most comedies do. What holds it at an eight for me is the gore. Verhoeven drags a few of the deaths out so long that the joke drowns in the blood, and I end up watching the effects when I should be watching the satire. Murphy saying his own name at the end still moves me.
9. Die Hard 2 (1990) [full review]
► Read the full review of Die Hard 2 (1990)
RLR: 8 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.1/10
"The second-best Die Hard, and being not the original is the whole problem."
Renny Harlin took over and moved McClane to an airport at Christmas, the structurally correct sequel decision: the same principle applied to a different enclosed system. Dulles in a snowstorm with aircraft circling and fuel running down is a legitimate pressure cooker. Walter Wager’s novel 58 Minutes supplied the premise and was considerably rewritten.
The film is considerably more violent than the original and less interested in why. McClane kills more people, the tone is harder, and exasperation has replaced the reflexive humor of the first picture. Willis plays tired from the opening scene. William Sadler plays Colonel Stuart and opens the film naked in an airport hotel.
The plane crash is the sequence that works. Harlin gives the audience the cockpit, the false glide slope, the landing lights in the wrong position, and then a full impact from outside on a runway, holding on McClane watching it happen. Steven de Souza and Doug Richardson share the screenplay credit.
The problem is a second betrayal the film asks the audience to be surprised by twice. Colonel Stuart’s team, then the reinforcements who turn out to be the same operation, and the film explains the double-cross at length because it doesn’t hold together. It cost around seventy million dollars and took over two hundred and forty.
RoboCop puts its politics in the advertisements and X-Men explains Magneto in three silent minutes. Two ways to argue without stating, in the Showing and Telling Handbook.
10. Under Siege 1 & 2 (1992, 1995) [full review]
► Read the full review of Under Siege 1 & 2 (1992, 1995)
RLR: 8 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 6.5/10
"Die Hard on a battleship, then on a train, and the first one works."
Andrew Davis made the only Seagal film that works as a film, and he did it by treating the star as a fixed quantity and building an actual thriller around him. Casey Ryback is a cook on a battleship who used to be something else, and nobody discovers this until the midpoint.
Tommy Lee Jones and Gary Busey are doing most of the acting and enjoying themselves enormously. Strannix is a former intelligence operative running a theatrical operation for money, and the film gives him enough grievance to be legible without explaining him at any length. Erika Eleniak plays the entertainer and Patrick O’Neal the ship’s captain.
Davis shoots the ship as a real space with decks, galleys, magazines and a route between them. The geography is established before the seizure, so every movement Ryback makes afterward is legible without a word of explanation. Davis went on to direct The Fugitive the following year off the strength of this.
The 1995 sequel moves the premise to a train and is a straight repeat with less craft. Geoff Murphy stages the action competently and the confined geography of a locomotive can’t do what a battleship did, because there’s nowhere for anybody to hide. Katherine Heigl and Eric Bogosian appear in the 1995 sequel.
Under Siege is the one Seagal movie I can watch without making excuses for it, and the credit goes to Tommy Lee Jones and Busey chewing through every scene they’re in. My reservation is Seagal himself, who gives the film nothing to work with, and the train sequel, which I’d tell anybody to skip. The battleship picture gets its eight from the villains and the geography.
11. Basic Instinct (1992) [full review]
► Read the full review of Basic Instinct (1992)
RLR: 8 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.0/10
"A police force that cannot tell seduction from investigation."
Verhoeven and Joe Eszterhas made the most commercially successful erotic thriller ever released and the construction is more careful than the reputation suggests. Every piece of evidence against Catherine Tramell is also evidence that somebody else is framing her. Eszterhas was paid three million dollars for the spec script, a record at the time.
Sharon Stone plays a novelist whose books predict murders, and the cleverest decision in the film is that she’s never rattled. She controls every interrogation, she enjoys the attention, and Verhoeven never gives the audience a private moment to check her against. Jan de Bont shot it two years before directing Speed himself.
Michael Douglas’s Nick Curran is the unpleasant element and it’s deliberate. He’s killed civilians, he’s under psychiatric supervision, and his behavior toward Beth is indefensible. The picture is about a compromised man being outplayed. George Dzundza plays Curran’s partner and Jeanne Tripplehorn the police psychologist.
The ice pick under the bed is the last shot and it’s the correct ending. Verhoeven fought to keep it, and the entire film collapses into a different picture if the camera holds on the couple instead of moving down to the floor. It took over three hundred and fifty million dollars against a forty-nine million budget.
12. Demolition Man (1993) [full review]
► Read the full review of Demolition Man (1993)
RLR: 8 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 6.7/10
"One of the funniest action films of its decade and accidentally prescient."
Marco Brambilla made his first film and produced a satire that’s aged into something closer to documentary. A frozen policeman is thawed into a pacified twenty-first century Los Angeles where swearing is fined and every restaurant is Taco Bell. Daniel Waters, Robert Reneau and Peter Lenkov share the screenplay credit.
The future is the joke and the joke is still funny. Verbal morality statutes, automated fines for profanity, a society that’s eliminated physical contact, and an underclass living in tunnels because they declined to be improved. Almost none of it was intended as prediction. Denis Leary plays the underground leader and Nigel Hawthorne the architect of the system.
Wesley Snipes is having more fun than anybody else in the picture. Simon Phoenix is loud, theatrical and dangerous, and the performance works at a tone Stallone sensibly declines to match. Elliot Goldenthal scored it and Brambilla came from video installation art. Snipes had made Passenger 57 the year before.
Sandra Bullock’s Lenina Huxley is the film’s best structural idea. She’s a police officer nostalgic for a century she’s only read about, so every piece of exposition arrives as enthusiasm instead of briefing. Different territories substituted their own restaurant chain in the dialogue.
Stallone plays it completely straight and that’s why the satire works. Spartan is confused, offended and out of place, and he never once comments on how ridiculous the world around him is. The film lets the audience do that. Jesse Ventura appears briefly as one of the thawed criminals.
Demolition Man is the silliest film in this tier, and those automated swearing fines make me laugh. Snipes steals the picture and Bullock is a delight as the cop who pines for a century she never saw. The action is where it sags for me. The fights are routine for 1993, and the jokes stay with me long after the explosions blur together.
13. Independence Day (1996) [full review]
► Read the full review of Independence Day (1996)
RLR: 8 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.0/10
"Defined what a summer blockbuster could be, and the model shots are real."
Roland Emmerich and Dean Devlin wrote it in about four weeks and Fox built the campaign around a single Super Bowl advertisement of the White House being destroyed. It took over eight hundred million dollars and effectively invented the modern summer release strategy. Volker Engel supervised the effects and won the Academy Award for them.
The destruction sequences were achieved with practical miniatures, so they still read as physically real. Models of the White House, the Empire State Building and entire city blocks were built and blown up, filmed at high frame rates and reversed where necessary. Jeff Goldblum, Will Smith and Bill Pullman lead the three threads.
Three separate protagonists converge, and the film manages the structure cleanly. A satellite technician, a fighter pilot and a president, each introduced with a distinct problem, and the convergence happens late enough that it reads as consequence instead of plotting. David Arnold scored it and went on to five Bond films.
Bill Pullman’s speech is the most-quoted thing in the film and it works because Emmerich commits to it entirely. No irony, no undercutting, and a president who flies the mission himself. The picture is sincere in a way that became unfashionable almost immediately afterward. Randy Quaid plays the crop duster pilot and gets the ending.
The virus is the plot hole everybody names and the film moves fast enough that it’s never mattered much. A laptop interfaces with alien systems, the audience is given about four seconds to think about it, and the picture is already somewhere else. A sequel arrived twenty years later and nobody has defended it.
Tron holds one visual rule and never breaks it, and Demolition Man gives its exposition to somebody delighted to deliver it. Build it in the World Builder’s Handbook.
14. Rush Hour (1998, 2001, 2007) [full review]
► Read the full review of Rush Hour (1998, 2001, 2007)
RLR: 8 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.0/10
"Two performers doing completely different things, and neither competes."
Brett Ratner made the film that introduced Jackie Chan to a mass American audience, seventeen years after Chan’s first attempt at the market failed. It took over two hundred and forty million dollars and the pairing with Chris Tucker is the entire reason. Ross LaManna wrote the original story and Jim Kouf the screenplay.
The two performers are doing completely different things and the film is built on the mismatch. Chan is physical and reactive, Tucker is verbal and relentless, and neither adjusts toward the other across three pictures. Chan’s earlier American attempt was The Big Brawl in 1980.
Chan’s choreography is constrained here compared to his Hong Kong work and the constraint is visible. American insurance requirements, shorter schedules and a studio unwilling to accept the risk produce sequences that are good instead of extraordinary. Tom Wilkinson plays the antagonist in the first film.
Rush Hour 2 in 2001 is the best of the three. The Hong Kong setting gives Chan material he can use, the massage parlor fight is the closest the series gets to his own films, and the bomb sequence on the yacht is properly staged. Rush Hour 3 in 2007 is the franchise as obligation. Six years had passed, the Paris setting adds nothing, and the picture is assembled from beats the first two films had already used more effectively. Lalo Schifrin scored all three, thirty years after Dirty Harry.
15. Ronin (1998) [full review]
► Read the full review of Ronin (1998)
RLR: 8 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.3/10
"The best car chases ever filmed, and nobody finds out what is in the case."
Frankenheimer was sixty-eight and made the best car chase film of the decade with practical vehicles, real streets and professional drivers in the cars while the actors were filmed separately. Nothing in the Paris or Nice sequences is a model or a composite. J. D. Zeik wrote the original screenplay and Mamet’s rewrite went uncredited by choice.
The plot is deliberately withheld and the film never explains it. A case, several interested parties, and nobody ever states what’s inside. David Mamet did an uncredited rewrite and his fingerprints are on every scene about professional process. Jean Reno, Stellan Skarsgard and Natascha McElhone complete the crew.
De Niro’s Sam is defined entirely by caution. He checks exits, refuses to enter a room he hasn’t scouted, and the conversation in the first act about ambushes and meetings sets the terms for everything that follows. Around three hundred stunt drivers worked the Paris and Nice sequences.
The Nice chase runs against traffic through a tunnel at real speed with the camera inside the vehicles. Several cars were modified with the driver seated on the opposite side, so the actors could appear to be driving while a professional was. Elia Cmiral scored it and Frankenheimer had made Grand Prix in 1966.
Ronin has the car chases I measure every other car chase against. Frankenheimer put professional drivers on real streets at real speed, and I can feel the difference from the first corner. My reservation is the stretch between chases, where the professional shop talk goes on a little long and the crew starts to blur into one careful man checking exits.
16. Three Kings (1999) [full review]
► Read the full review of Three Kings (1999)
RLR: 8 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.1/10
"A heist film that becomes a film about what the ceasefire actually meant."
David O. Russell made a heist film about the end of the first Gulf War and shot it on stock processed to produce a bleached, overexposed image nobody had used for a studio picture. The production was difficult enough that Russell and George Clooney have both discussed it publicly.
The premise turns at the midpoint and the film is honest about the turn. Four soldiers go after Kuwaiti gold and encounter an uprising the American ceasefire had encouraged and then abandoned, and the heist becomes an evacuation nobody has orders to conduct. Warner Bros. released it in 1999 and it took around one hundred and seven million.
The wound sequence is the film’s most distinctive idea. Russell cuts inside a body to show a bullet path through tissue and a collapsing lung, explaining in about eight seconds why a torso wound kills slowly, and the film refers back to it later. Newton Thomas Sigel shot it on the processed stock.
Spike Jonze, Ice Cube and Mark Wahlberg play the other three and none of them is playing a soldier from a previous war film. They’re bored, poorly informed, and looking for something to have done with the deployment. Nora Dunn plays the reporter and Cliff Curtis the Iraqi father.
17. X-Men (2000) [full review]
► Read the full review of X-Men (2000)
RLR: 8 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.3/10
"The film that proved comic material could carry a serious register."
Bryan Singer made the film that proved comic adaptations could carry serious material, two years before Spider-Man and eight before Iron Man. It cost around seventy-five million dollars, a modest figure for the genre even then, and the budget shows in the restraint. David Hayter wrote the credited screenplay after several earlier drafts.
The Magneto opening is the best decision in the picture. A boy is separated from his parents at a camp gate in 1944 and bends a fence with his hands, and the film explains the entire antagonist in three minutes without a word of dialogue about his philosophy.
Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart give the film its weight and both of them play the argument as a real disagreement between old friends. Neither position is presented as obviously correct, rarer in the genre than it should be. Halle Berry, Famke Janssen and Anna Paquin fill out the school.
Hugh Jackman was cast late after Dougray Scott became unavailable, and he’s nine inches taller than the character in the source material. The casting worked well enough that it defined the part for seventeen years. Michael Kamen scored it, thirteen years after Lethal Weapon.
The leather costumes and the small scale are both products of the budget and both help. The film is about a school, a train station and a statue, and it never attempts a scale it couldn’t have delivered convincingly in 2000. Tyler Mane and Ray Park play Sabretooth and Toad.
Under Siege never asks its lead to change and loads every variation onto the antagonists. Work with a fixed character using the Protagonist Handbook.
18. Memento (2000) [full review]
► Read the full review of Memento (2000)
RLR: 8 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 8.4/10
"Told backwards, because that is what it is like not to know how you got here."
Nolan adapted his brother’s short story and ran the film backward in color sequences interleaved with a forward-running black and white strand. The two meet in the middle at the moment the audience learns what has been happening. Jonathan Nolan published the short story after the film was already in development.
Leonard’s condition is the structure. Leonard can’t form new memories, so the audience is put in his position by being denied everything that came before each scene. They know what’s about to happen and not what caused it, his experience inverted. The two strands converge in a single scene.
It was shot in twenty-five days for around nine million dollars and no distributor would take it for close to a year. Newmarket released it themselves and it took more than forty. Insomnia and Batman Begins followed from it. Carrie-Anne Moss and Joe Pantoliano play the two people around him.
The Sammy Jankis material is the film’s real subject and most of the argument about the ending turns on it. Teddy’s account in the final scene reclassifies the entire story and the film gives the audience exactly enough to believe him or not. David Julyan scored it and had worked with Nolan on Following.
Guy Pearce plays Leonard as somebody who has decided that having a purpose is worth more than having the truth, and the last line, delivered as a decision instead of a confession, is the most chilling thing in the picture. It was nominated for Original Screenplay and Editing and won neither.
Memento is the cleverest film in this tier, and I’m more impressed by it than entertained. The backward structure is a terrific trick, and it keeps me working the puzzle when I’d like to be feeling something for Leonard. That distance is what holds it at an eight for me. Pearce’s last line still chills me.
19. Pirates of the Caribbean (2003) [full review]
► Read the full review of Pirates of the Caribbean (2003)
RLR: 8 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 8.1/10
"Adapted from a theme park ride, in a genre that had bankrupted a studio."
Gore Verbinski made a film from a theme park ride, a proposition everybody involved understood was absurd, and it took over half a billion dollars. The pirate genre had been commercially dead since Cutthroat Island lost around a hundred million in 1995. Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio wrote it and had written Aladdin and Shrek.
Johnny Depp built the performance on Keith Richards and Pepe Le Pew and executives believed he was sabotaging the film while it was shooting. Disney’s leadership asked repeatedly whether the character was drunk, and Depp refused to adjust anything. Hans Zimmer and Klaus Badelt built the score under enormous time pressure.
The curse is the structural device that makes the action work. The cursed crew can’t be killed, removing the stakes from every fight involving them, so the film has to generate tension from objectives and geography instead of from danger. Four sequels followed and the series has taken over four and a half billion dollars.
The moonlight transitions are the best visual idea in the picture. Men become skeletons when they cross into light and back when they leave it, turning a plain sword fight into a problem of positioning the audience can follow. Jack Davenport and Jonathan Pryce complete the principal cast.
Geoffrey Rush plays Barbossa as somebody tired of being unable to taste food or feel anything, and the performance gives the film an antagonist with a coherent want. Bloom and Knightley are doing conventional work and the picture needs them to. Depp was nominated for Best Actor, close to unheard of for the genre.
20. Open Range (2003) [full review]
► Read the full review of Open Range (2003)
RLR: 8 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.5/10
"Ninety minutes of weather, food and a dog, then the best gunfight in modern westerns."
Kevin Costner directed and starred in a western about free-grazing cattlemen confronted by a landowner, and the film spends most of its length on process. Weather, cooking, moving animals, and two men who have worked together for years and say very little about it. Lauren Craddock adapted Lauran Paine’s novel The Open Range Men.
The gunfight is the most accurate ever staged and it’s the reason people remember the picture. It’s chaotic, brief, confusing and terrifying, and it opens with a single shot that arrives with no build at all and kills somebody instantly. Annette Bening plays the doctor’s sister and Michael Gambon the landowner.
Costner’s insistence on realism extends to the sound. The reports are enormous, the ringing afterward is audible, and men take cover and can’t hear instructions. Nobody in the sequence is accurate and almost nobody knows what’s happening. James Muro shot it in Alberta and Costner produced it himself.
Robert Duvall is the best thing in it. Boss Spearman is practical, unsentimental and carrying something he never discusses, and the performance is so unforced that the film’s slow first hour becomes the reason the last twenty minutes work. Michael Kamen scored it and died shortly before the release.
Open Range has the best gunfight I’ve seen in a western, and Duvall is wonderful in it. The first hour tests my patience, though. I understand exactly why Costner spends it on cooking and cattle, and I agree it pays off, but I’d have trimmed twenty minutes and lost nothing. When the first shot finally comes, it stuns me.
Honorable Mentions: Action Films Without a Review Here Yet
No review on the site for any of these so far. Each belongs in this tier or close to it and each is on the list.
Kagemusha (1980)
Kurosawa put a thief in the place of a dead warlord and let the impersonation hold a clan together. Coppola and Lucas produced it internationally after he had been unable to get funding in Japan.
The 36th Chamber of Shaolin (1978)
Lau Kar-leung spends most of the film on training instead of fighting, moving through thirty-five chambers of increasingly specific physical discipline. Almost every martial arts film that followed copied the structure.
Iron Monkey (1993)
Yuen Woo-ping directed and choreographed a film where the fights are shot wide and held, and the cast performed the pole sequence over burning stakes with wire assistance and no digital work at all.
Zatoichi (2003)
Takeshi Kitano took the blind swordsman character and ended the film with a tap dance sequence performed by the entire village. The violence is fast, flat and completely without ceremony.
Samurai Rebellion (1967)
Kobayashi and Mifune built a film almost entirely on a family refusing an unjust order, and the violence arrives only in the last twenty minutes. Everything before it’s two hours of quiet institutional pressure.
Kill! (1968)
Kihachi Okamoto made a comedy out of the samurai film using the same source novel as Sanjuro, and the result is closer to a Leone western than to anything Japanese cinema was producing that year.
Lone Wolf and Cub (1972)
Six films across two years, with an executioner pushing a baby cart fitted with concealed blades. The American edit combined two of them into Shogun Assassin and is the version most people saw first.
The Duellists (1977)
Ridley Scott’s first feature, following two French officers through sixteen years of duels neither can remember the reason for. Keith Carradine and Harvey Keitel age visibly across the running time.
Rob Roy (1995)
Released six weeks before Braveheart and considerably better, with Tim Roth as the most hateful antagonist of the decade. The final duel contrasts a broadsword against a rapier and the result isn’t what the genre promises.
The Last of the Mohicans (1992)
Michael Mann shot the Carolina mountains as wilderness and gave the film a score that’s been used in trailers ever since. The last twenty minutes contain almost no dialogue at all.
Master and Commander (2003)
Peter Weir built a naval film around ship-handling, scurvy and a friendship conducted through violin duets. It was nominated for ten Academy Awards and lost most of them to The Return of the King.
Apocalypto (2006)
Mel Gibson shot a chase film entirely in Yucatec Maya with an unknown cast, and the last hour is one sustained pursuit through jungle. The historical accuracy is disputed and the film-making isn’t.
Dishonorable Mentions: Action Films That Failed
Also unreviewed here. Each had the budget, the cast or the premise and lost it somewhere between the pitch and the edit.
Warcraft (2016)
Duncan Jones made a film that assumes the audience already cares about two factions it introduces at once, with roughly a dozen named characters and no protagonist. It performed well only in China.
Doom (2005)
A game about demons from another dimension adapted into a film about a genetic experiment, removing the only distinctive thing in the source. The first-person sequence near the end is the one idea anybody remembers.
Bloodshot (2020)
Vin Diesel as a soldier whose memories are manufactured to direct his revenge, a good premise revealed at the midpoint and then abandoned for a conventional pursuit.
Hellboy (2019)
A reboot of a series with two well-regarded del Toro films behind it, made harder and louder with a production the director has publicly described as interfered with throughout.
Gemini Man (2019)
Ang Lee shot it at a hundred and twenty frames per second, a format almost no cinema could project, and attached the technology to a plot about a cloned assassin that had been circulating since 1997.
Van Helsing (2004)
Stephen Sommers applied The Mummy’s approach to three monsters at once with a budget around one hundred and sixty million dollars. The digital work is weightless and the film never stops moving long enough to establish anything.
The problem with this group is how much money and technology went into each one while the story got whatever was left over. Gemini Man is the worst offender, a projection format almost no theater could show bolted onto a cloned-assassin plot that had been kicking around since 1997, and I wish somebody had spent a tenth of that effort on the script.
What Do You Think?
This tier is where satire delivered straight does the most work. RoboCop is here and Demolition Man is here, and both of them are funnier because nobody inside the film is laughing. My vote goes to RoboCop without much hesitation, because its jokes still draw blood and Demolition Man’s mostly draw a grin. Tell me which one holds up better now.
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
