Part 7 – The Watchable
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
Two films here have the same problem stated plainly in their own reviews. Logan’s Run has a concept worth an eight or a nine and an execution worth a six, because the ending retreats from the horror the premise sets up. The Running Man is a better idea than film, with a death-sport broadcast as the mechanism of social control, delivered as a Schwarzenegger vehicle.
The pattern is the most common failure in commercial writing. The idea sells the project and then the project is built to a shape the idea does not fit, and the gap is visible to anybody who has read the pitch.
Every rating is the one carried by the review it links to. Ties are broken by year, and this is the seventh of eleven parts.
Logan’s Run has a premise worth a nine and an ending worth a five, and The Running Man promises a scale it never stages. Match the delivery to the idea in the Plot Handbook.
1. Faster (2010) [full review]
► Read the full review of Faster (2010)
RLR: 7 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 6.5/10
"Three men converging with almost no dialogue between them."
George Tillman Jr. made a lean revenge picture with Dwayne Johnson as a man released after ten years working through a list, and the decision to give him almost no dialogue at all is the right one. The film opens on a prison release and supplies no background whatsoever.
The characters have no names. Driver, Cop, Killer. The film is structured as three parallel tracks converging, and the stripped-down approach recalls seventies revenge pictures considerably more than anything else released that year. Carla Gugino and Maggie Grace appear in supporting parts. The three tracks converge in the last twenty minutes.
Billy Bob Thornton plays the detective with an addiction and ten days left before retirement, and the performance is doing more work than the plot requires of it. He is the only character in the film with an interior life the script bothers to sketch.
The reveal about why the list exists is the film’s one genuine idea and it lands quietly. Johnson has been killing men who were present at something he has misremembered, and the last name on the list turns out to be the one that matters.
2. Jack Reacher (2012) [full review]
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RLR: 7 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.0/10
"McQuarrie directing, and the casting argument never resolves."
Christopher McQuarrie adapted Lee Child’s One Shot and the casting argument overwhelmed everything else. Reacher is six foot five and around two hundred and fifty pounds in the novels, Cruise is not, and Child defended the choice publicly for years afterward. Child published One Shot in 2005 as the ninth Reacher novel.
The film is considerably better than the argument allowed people to notice. The investigation is procedural and careful, the sniper sequence that opens it is staged with almost no dialogue, and the picture takes its own forensics seriously throughout. Rosamund Pike plays the defense attorney and Robert Duvall the range owner.
The car chase through Pittsburgh is shot without music, with real vehicles and audible engines, and it is the best sequence Cruise has done outside the Mission: Impossible films. McQuarrie holds shots long enough for the geography to register properly. McQuarrie went on to write and direct four Mission: Impossible films.
Werner Herzog plays the antagonist as a man who ate his own fingers in a Siberian prison camp, delivers one monologue about it, and then disappears for most of the film. It is the strangest casting decision in an action picture that decade. Amazon later recast the part with Alan Ritchson for television.
3. The Dark Knight Rises (2012) [full review]
► Read the full review of The Dark Knight Rises (2012)
RLR: 7 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 8.4/10
"A trilogy conclusion carrying more weight than it can move."
Nolan closed the trilogy with the most ambitious and least controlled entry, running two hours and forty-five minutes across an eight-year time jump, a stadium collapse and an occupied city. It took over a billion dollars and the reputation has softened since. Jonathan and Christopher Nolan wrote it from a story with David S. Goyer.
Tom Hardy’s Bane is a genuine physical threat in a way the Joker never was, and the performance survives a voice track that was remixed after complaints about audibility. The tunnel ambush and the stock exchange sequence are both properly staged. Anne Hathaway plays Selina Kyle and Joseph Gordon-Levitt the young officer.
The pit is the film’s best structural idea. Bruce has to climb without a rope, the instruction is that fear is the thing that makes the jump possible, and the sequence states the trilogy’s argument more directly than either previous entry managed. Wally Pfister shot it and Hans Zimmer scored it alone this time.
The plotting is where it comes apart. A city isolated for five months with a nuclear device, a police force underground for the duration, and a protagonist who returns from the other side of the world with no money and no explanation of how. The stadium sequence used eleven thousand extras in Pittsburgh.
The Talia reveal is the element that has aged worst. Marion Cotillard’s performance is fine and the film has not earned the turn, because the character exists for about forty minutes and the plot requires her to have been the center of everything. It cost around two hundred and fifty million dollars.
4. Iron Man 3 (2013) [full review]
► Read the full review of Iron Man 3 (2013)
RLR: 7 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.1/10
"Shane Black’s Christmas noir, inside a superhero franchise."
Shane Black wrote and directed it, set it at Christmas as he sets everything at Christmas, and made the most structurally interesting entry in the sequence. Stark spends most of the film without the suit, in Tennessee, working the problem as an engineer. Drew Pearce co-wrote it with Black and Shane Black had directed Kiss Kiss Bang Bang.
The Mandarin reveal is the most divisive thing Marvel has done and it is also the smartest. A terrorist figure assembled from every threatening image the audience has been trained on turns out to be an actor hired to perform them, and the real threat is a businessman with a grievance.
Ben Kingsley is extraordinary in both halves. The Mandarin broadcasts are genuinely menacing and Trevor Slattery is a drunk with a football habit, and the transition between them happens in a single scene with no adjustment period. Guy Pearce plays Killian and Rebecca Hall the botanist who built the technology.
The anxiety material gives Downey something to play that the previous films had not. Stark has panic attacks, cannot sleep, builds compulsively, and the film treats the aftermath of a New York invasion as something that would actually damage a person. It took over one and a quarter billion dollars, the highest in the trilogy.
The barrel of monkeys rescue is the best action sequence in the trilogy. Thirteen people falling from an aircraft, caught in sequence by a suit that cannot carry them, and the solution is a chain formed in freefall. The skydivers performed it for real. Black and Downey had worked together a decade earlier.
Adrian Toomes lost a legitimate business and Malekith wants the universe dark for no stated reason. Build a grievance that holds, using the Antagonist Handbook.
5. Spider-Man: Homecoming (2017) [full review]
► Read the full review of Spider-Man: Homecoming (2017)
RLR: 7 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.4/10
"The best Peter Parker since Maguire, and the villain is a small businessman."
Jon Watts made the first Spider-Man film that treats the protagonist as fifteen, and the decision organizes everything. The stakes are a decathlon trip and a homecoming dance, the suit has training wheels, and the film refuses to restage the origin for a third time.
Michael Keaton’s Adrian Toomes is the best antagonist Marvel produced in that period. He is a salvage contractor whose business was destroyed by a federal cleanup agency after the Avengers wrecked New York, and his grievance is entirely legitimate. Six writers share the screenplay credit across three writing teams.
The car sequence is the film’s strongest scene and contains no action at all. Toomes works out who Peter is while driving him to a dance, the conversation stays polite, and the threat is delivered as advice from a father about a boy he likes.
The Washington Monument and the ferry are both well staged and the film keeps the scale domestic on purpose. Peter cannot fly, the city is Queens instead of Manhattan, and the final fight happens on a beach with nobody watching. Marisa Tomei plays May Parker and Jacob Batalon plays Ned.
The Vulture’s wings are the best practical-looking design in the sequence. Salvaged alien technology welded onto an exosuit by people who fabricate for a living, and the film is specific that these are tradesmen instead of scientists. Michael Giacchino scored it and reworked the 1967 cartoon theme for the opening.
6. Monster Hunter (2020) [full review]
► Read the full review of Monster Hunter (2020)
RLR: 7 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 5.2/10
"Action camp that knows exactly what it is."
Paul W. S. Anderson adapted a game about elaborate creature ecology, crafting systems and multi-hour hunts into a film where a soldier hits things with a sword. The world the source is built on barely appears. Capcom published the original game in 2004 and the series has sold enormously.
The first act is a genuinely strong survival sequence. A military unit is transported to another world, they are hunted by something they cannot fight, and Anderson holds the creature offscreen for long enough that the tension works. Milla Jovovich and Tony Jaa lead and Ron Perlman appears late.
The Diablos and Rathalos are well rendered and the practical work on the dust and the sand is good. The creature design is the one place where the film respects its source, and the fights are shot clearly enough to follow. It cost around sixty million dollars and was released during the pandemic.
The structure collapses after the first hour. The film becomes two people training in a cave with no shared language, the plot invents a tower and a portal, and the ending is a sequel setup for a picture nobody was going to finance. Anderson had directed six Resident Evil films for the same producers.
7. Bullet Train (2022) [full review]
► Read the full review of Bullet Train (2022)
RLR: 7 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.2/10
"Interlocking missions on one train, and the connections are the plot."
David Leitch adapted Kotaro Isaka’s novel and turned it into a comedy about assassins on a Shinkansen, with Brad Pitt as a career criminal in therapy trying to avoid violence. The tone is the whole gamble and it mostly pays. Isaka published Maria Beetle in 2010 and it was translated in 2021.
Brian Tyree Henry and Aaron Taylor-Johnson are the reason it works. Lemon and Tangerine bicker about Thomas the Tank Engine as a moral framework for two hours, and the running joke is committed to hard enough that it becomes genuine character work. Zak Olkewicz wrote the screenplay and Leitch had made Atomic Blonde and Deadpool 2.
The structure is a farce. A briefcase, a poisoned snake, a son being transported, several parties who do not know about each other, and Isaka’s plotting is tight enough that the coincidences resolve into a design instead of an accumulation. Sandra Bullock, Bad Bunny and Hiroyuki Sanada appear across the cast.
The whitewashing criticism was substantial and Isaka’s own response was that he had written the characters without specified ethnicity. The film keeps the Japanese setting and fills it with an almost entirely non-Japanese cast, a decision it never addresses. It took over two hundred and thirty million dollars worldwide.
8. Violent Night (2022) [full review]
► Read the full review of Violent Night (2022)
RLR: 7 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 6.7/10
"Santa Claus as a disillusioned former Viking, in a Die Hard structure."
Tommy Wirkola made a Die Hard variant in which Santa Claus is real, exhausted, alcoholic and a former Viking raider, and the film commits to every part of that premise without ever asking the audience to find it clever. Pat Casey and Josh Miller wrote it and had written the Sonic films.
David Harbour plays the part entirely straight. Santa is tired of the job, disappointed in what children ask for, and physically capable in a way the film explains through a flashback to a man called Nikamund the Red. John Leguizamo plays the antagonist and Beverly D’Angelo the matriarch.
The sledgehammer is the best idea in it. Santa’s old weapon is retrieved in the last act and the film has established the mythology carefully enough that the audience knows exactly what it means when he picks it up. It cost around twenty million dollars and took over seventy-six.
The Home Alone sequence is where the film shows its hand. A child sets traps in an attic, the results are shot as genuine injury instead of comedy, and the joke is that everybody in the scene is treating it as a legitimate defensive strategy.
9. The Fantastic Four: First Steps (2025) [full review]
► Read the full review of The Fantastic Four: First Steps (2025)
RLR: 7 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.1/10
"The first Galactus at the scale the character actually needs."
Matt Shakman set the film in a retro-futurist alternate 1960s and never explains the setting, the correct decision. The Baxter Building, the launch programme and the public celebrity of the team are all established as ordinary facts of that world. Pedro Pascal, Vanessa Kirby, Joseph Quinn and Ebon Moss-Bachrach lead the cast.
The family dynamic is the thing three previous attempts could not manage. These four people have lived together for years, the shorthand is established, and the film spends its first act on domestic routine instead of on how any of them acquired anything. Michael Giacchino scored it and Shakman had directed WandaVision.
Galactus is handled correctly and at scale. He is not negotiated with, he does not have a grievance, and the film treats him as a fact of the universe instead of an antagonist with a plan that can be foiled. Ralph Ineson voices Galactus and Julia Garner plays the Silver Surfer.
The Silver Surfer material is the strongest in the picture. A herald who made a bargain to save somewhere else, delivered with almost no dialogue, and the film lets the implication of what that bargain cost sit without explaining it. It is the fourth attempt at the property across twenty-eight years.
The Reed and Sue material carries the emotional weight and it is genuinely well written. A pregnancy, a decision about a child, and a man who solves everything unable to solve the only thing that matters to him. Jess Hall shot it on film with period-appropriate lenses.
Underworld gets more from elders sleeping in rotation than from a thousand years of chronicle. Find the arrangement that generates conflict, in the World Builder’s Handbook.
10. Underworld Series (2003-2016) [full review]
► Read the full review of Underworld Series (2003-2016)
RLR: 6.5 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 6.6/10
"Shallow, repetitive, ridiculous, and entirely committed."
Five films across thirteen years, built on a war between vampires and lycans that predates the first picture by centuries. Len Wiseman directed two, Kate Beckinsale appears in four, and the aesthetic is blue filters and leather throughout. Danny McBride and Kevin Grevioux wrote the original story.
The first film in 2003 has the most coherent mythology. A hereditary conflict, a bloodline nobody has exploited, and a political structure among the vampires with elders who sleep in rotation for centuries at a time. Michael Sheen plays Lucian across three of the five films.
Rise of the Lycans in 2009 is the best of them and the one nobody saw. It is a prequel with Michael Sheen and Bill Nighy, it removes Beckinsale almost entirely, and it has an actual argument about a slave revolt underneath the genre material.
The escalation problem is the same one Resident Evil has. Selene acquires abilities across the sequence, each film needs a larger threat, and by Blood Wars the mythology has accumulated more rules than any of the plots can use. The sequence has taken over five hundred million dollars in total.
11. Guardians of the Galaxy (2014) [full review]
► Read the full review of Guardians of the Galaxy (2014)
RLR: 6.5 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 8.0/10
"Creatively committed, and the inflection point where the comic register started accelerating."
James Gunn took Marvel’s least known property and made the most distinctive film in the sequence, largely by refusing the house tone. The needle drops are diegetic, the color palette is saturated, and every character is introduced as unlikeable. Nicole Perlman wrote an early draft and shares the screenplay credit with Gunn.
The prison break is the film’s best sequence and the one that establishes the method. Five people who do not trust each other execute a plan requiring a prosthetic leg, a security band and a guard’s music player, and the whole thing is played as farce.
Rocket and Groot work because the film takes both of them seriously. Bradley Cooper plays Rocket as somebody genuinely damaged by what was done to make him, and the scene where he describes it while drunk is the film’s most affecting minute. Chris Pratt had come from Parks and Recreation and lost sixty pounds for it.
The Awesome Mix is the structural device nobody else had used this way. The music is on a cassette his mother made, so every needle drop is a character detail instead of a soundtrack choice, and the film’s ending turns on a second tape. Vin Diesel recorded Groot’s line in several languages for foreign releases.
Ronan is the weakest element and the film knows it. He is a conventional zealot with a hammer, the performance is undercut by a dance-off, and the picture is considerably more interested in Yondu and Nebula than in its own antagonist. Tyler Bates scored it and the Awesome Mix soundtrack went to number one.
12. Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings (2021) [full review]
► Read the full review of Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings (2021)
RLR: 6.5 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.4/10
"The choreography draws on Hong Kong tradition instead of franchise convention."
Destin Daniel Cretton made the first Marvel film built on martial arts choreography instead of power sets, with Brad Allan supervising the action before his death during post-production. The bus sequence and the scaffolding fight are both genuinely well staged. Dave Callaham wrote it with Cretton and Andrew Lanham.
Tony Leung is the reason the film works and it is his first English-language role. Wenwu is a thousand-year-old conqueror who stopped for a woman, restarted after she died, and Leung plays him as a man in grief instead of a villain with a plan.
The film retires the Mandarin problem the franchise had created for itself. Iron Man 3 made the figure an actor, this film makes the actor a decoy, and Ben Kingsley returns to acknowledge both without the picture stopping to apologize. Simu Liu was cast after publicly asking Marvel about the part on social media.
The last act is the familiar failure. A digital dragon fights a digital soul-eater above a village, the martial arts that defined the first two hours disappear, and the film resolves through scale instead of skill. Awkwafina plays Katy and Michelle Yeoh appears in the second half.
13. Logan’s Run (1976) [full review]
► Read the full review of Logan’s Run (1976)
RLR: 6 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 6.7/10
"The concept earns an eight or nine. The film that executes it earns a six."
Michael Anderson adapted a novel in which the age limit is twenty-one and raised it to thirty for the film, the first of several softenings. The production design won a special Academy Award and the miniature city work is genuinely impressive. William F. Nolan and George Clayton Johnson published the novel in 1967.
The premise is worth considerably more than the execution delivers. A sealed domed society where everybody is killed at thirty, a population that believes in renewal, and a ceremony that is a public execution attended as entertainment. Michael York plays Logan and Jenny Agutter plays Jessica.
Carousel is the best sequence and the film never returns to what it implies. People rise into a chamber, are destroyed in front of a cheering crowd, and everybody present genuinely believes some of them will be reborn. Farrah Fawcett appears briefly and the film was her first substantial credit.
The last act retreats from everything. Logan and Jessica reach the surface, find an old man with cats in a ruined Washington, and the film resolves by destroying the computer and releasing a population with no idea how to live outside. Jerry Goldsmith scored it using electronic instruments throughout.
Peter Ustinov plays the old man and the material is charming and completely at odds with the picture around it. A film about a society that murders its citizens ends with cats, poetry recitation and a gentle old gentleman. A television series followed in 1977 and ran fourteen episodes.
Last Action Hero proves its premise by having a man test it in public, and Guardians makes its soundtrack a cassette. Two demonstrations in the Showing and Telling Handbook.
14. The Running Man (1987) [full review]
► Read the full review of The Running Man (1987)
RLR: 6 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 6.6/10
"A better idea than film, and a great campy eighties one regardless."
Paul Michael Glaser took over from Andrew Davis a week into production and made a considerably broader film than the Stephen King novella supports. Richard Bachman’s book is bleak, procedural and ends with an aircraft flown into a building. Steven de Souza wrote the screenplay, having written Die Hard the same year.
The premise is the best idea in eighties science fiction. A totalitarian state runs a game show where convicts are hunted for entertainment, ratings are the mechanism of social control, and the population participates enthusiastically. Maria Conchita Alonso and Yaphet Kotto appear alongside Schwarzenegger. King published it under the Bachman name in 1982.
The stalkers are the film’s compromise. Buzzsaw, Dynamo, Fireball and Subzero are professional wrestlers in costumes, and the picture becomes a series of individual bouts instead of a hunt across a city. Jesse Ventura plays Captain Freedom and Jim Brown plays Fireball. Vic Armstrong coordinated the stunt work.
Richard Dawson is the best thing in it and he is playing himself with the charm weaponized. Killian is a genuine game show host, the performance is note-perfect, and the manipulation of the studio audience is the only part of the satire that fully works.
The film has aged into relevance nobody intended. Manufactured footage, a population voting on executions, and an entertainment industry acting as the state’s enforcement arm. The satire is broader than the novella and lands harder now than it did. It cost around twenty-seven million dollars and took over thirty-eight.
15. Marked for Death (1990) [full review]
► Read the full review of Marked for Death (1990)
RLR: 6 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 6.1/10
"The formula without the specificity that made Out for Justice work."
Dwight Little made the third Seagal picture and it is the most efficient of them. A retired federal agent returns to suburban Chicago and finds a Jamaican posse operating in his sister’s neighborhood, and the film runs ninety-three minutes. Keith David and Tom Wright play the two allies Hatcher recruits.
Basil Wallace plays Screwface and is doing considerably more than the film requires. The performance is theatrical, committed and genuinely menacing, and he is the only reason anybody remembers the picture at all. Little had directed Halloween 4 two years earlier. His name comes from the ritual scarring the film keeps returning to.
The Jamaican material is the film’s permanent problem. It was protested on release, the portrayal is a collection of stock threats with no interest in anything specific, and the studio added a disclaimer nobody believed. Twentieth Century Fox released it in October 1990. Fox added a card stating the film was not about Jamaicans generally.
The action is well shot and brutally direct. Seagal’s aikido photographs badly in most of his films and Little solves it by keeping the camera close and the sequences short, with joint breaks that land in a single frame. It cost around eleven million dollars and took close to fifty-eight.
16. Last Action Hero (1993) [full review]
► Read the full review of Last Action Hero (1993)
RLR: 6 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 6.5/10
"Genuinely clever, and it loses you halfway through."
John McTiernan made a film about the exhaustion of the genre he had helped define, released it a week after Jurassic Park, and watched it fail completely. It has been reassessed steadily since and the reassessment is warranted. Shane Black and David Arnott rewrote a spec script by Zak Penn and Adam Leff.
The premise is a boy with a magic ticket entering an action film, and the picture is genuinely funny about the conventions. Police captains who scream, women who exist to be endangered, and a Los Angeles where every phone number begins with the same digits.
Charles Dance plays Benedict and gets the film’s best idea. He works out that he is in a film, crosses into the real world, and discovers that people there do not have the protection the genre grants them. He shoots somebody in the street and nobody reacts.
Schwarzenegger is doing something unusual and the audience of 1993 did not want it. He is playing a fictional character discovering he is fictional, the performance is genuinely sad in places, and the marketing sold it as a comedy vehicle. F. Murray Abraham plays a traitor and the film flags him through Amadeus.
The film’s structural problem is that it needs the audience to love the conventions and to find them ridiculous at the same time. It never resolves which mode it is in, and the tonal instability is the reason it did not work in the room.
17. Broken Arrow (1996) [full review]
► Read the full review of Broken Arrow (1996)
RLR: 6 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 6.1/10
"Woo’s transitional Hollywood film, and the register never settles."
John Woo’s second American film put two stolen nuclear warheads in the Utah desert and gave John Travolta the best time he had had in years. The premise is clean and the film has no interest in complicating it. Graham Yost wrote it the year after Speed.
Travolta plays Deakins as somebody enjoying himself enormously. He grins, he lectures, he plays chess with his co-pilot in the opening scene, and the performance is pitched about two levels above everything else in the picture. Samantha Mathis plays the park ranger who ends up in the middle of it.
Christian Slater’s Hale is the problem. The film needs a straight man and gives him nothing to play, so the audience spends two hours waiting for Travolta to come back on screen. The imbalance is structural instead of a performance issue. It cost around sixty-five million dollars and took over one hundred and fifty.
Woo’s style is visible in fragments and constrained everywhere else. The Mexican standoff in the mine, the helicopter, the train. The studio cut the operatic register he had brought from Hong Kong and the film is competent where it could have been distinctive. Hans Zimmer scored it with Duane Eddy playing guitar throughout.
Faster gives its characters job descriptions instead of names and First Steps skips the origin entirely. Two ways to save an act, in the Protagonist Handbook.
18. Volcano (1997) [full review]
► Read the full review of Volcano (1997)
RLR: 6 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 5.5/10
"The less accurate of 1997’s two volcano films and the more entertaining."
Mick Jackson released it two months after Dante’s Peak and the comparison is instructive. This is the larger film, the more expensive one, and the one with almost no interest in how volcanoes actually work. Jerome Armstrong and Billy Ray wrote the screenplay. Fox released it in April 1997 into a crowded market.
The premise is a lava flow moving down Wilshire Boulevard, geologically absurd and visually excellent. Los Angeles is not built on a volcanic system, the film knows this, and it proceeds anyway. Anne Heche plays the seismologist and Don Cheadle the deputy director. The film proceeds without apologizing for it.
Tommy Lee Jones is the best thing in it by a wide margin. He plays an emergency management director as somebody doing logistics under pressure, and the performance treats the disaster as a resource allocation problem instead of a spectacle. It cost around ninety million dollars and took just over one hundred and twenty.
The concrete barrier sequence is the film’s one genuinely good idea. The response is to divert the flow using the city’s own infrastructure, a solution the audience can follow and which uses the setting instead of ignoring it. Alan Silvestri scored it. Jackson had made The Bodyguard five years earlier.
19. Lara Croft: Tomb Raider (2001) [full review]
► Read the full review of Lara Croft: Tomb Raider (2001)
RLR: 6 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 5.8/10
"Made Jolie a global action star and does very little else."
Simon West made the first film built around a video game character who was already a cultural figure, and the casting of Angelina Jolie is the only reason it works at all. She trained for months and performs a substantial amount of the physical work.
The opening sequence is the best in the film. Lara fights a training robot in a hall, the bungee ballet afterward establishes her as somebody who does this for entertainment, and the picture never again finds that register. Core Design created the character in 1996 and the games had sold tens of millions.
The plot is Illuminati, a planetary alignment and a triangle in two halves, delivered through exposition nobody in the film appears to have read. Iain Glen’s Manfred Powell is given no motive beyond wanting the artifact. Jon Voight plays Lara’s father, a casting fact that is also true offscreen.
The Cambodia temple sequence is where the film comes closest to the source. Stone statues animate, the geometry of the room is the puzzle, and for about eight minutes the picture is actually doing what the game does. It took over two hundred and seventy million dollars and produced one sequel.
20. Thor: The Dark World (2013) [full review]
► Read the full review of Thor: The Dark World (2013)
RLR: 6 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 6.8/10
"The weakest of its phase, and the antagonist has no reason anybody can state."
Alan Taylor came from Game of Thrones and Marvel wanted a grittier Asgard, producing a film that is neither Branagh’s tragedy nor Waititi’s comedy. Patty Jenkins was attached and left over creative differences before production. Christopher Yost, Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely share the screenplay credit.
The Dark Elves are the least memorable antagonists in the sequence. Malekith wants to return the universe to darkness, Christopher Eccleston is unrecognizable under prosthetics and delivers most of his dialogue in an invented language, and the character has no scenes outside his own plan.
Loki is the only part that works and the film knows it. The prison sequence, the illusions during the escape, and the false death are all better than anything around them, and Hiddleston is playing a different film to everybody else. Rene Russo and Idris Elba return and Kat Dennings provides most of the comedy.
The Greenwich finale is genuinely inventive and arrives too late. Portals open and close mid-fight, combatants fall through them into other realms, and for about four minutes the picture has an action idea nothing else in the franchise had attempted. Brian Tyler scored it and it took over six hundred and forty million dollars.
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.
Drunken Master (1978)
Yuen Woo-ping and Jackie Chan invented the kung fu comedy here and the training sequences are as punishing as the fights. It made Chan a star after Lo Wei had spent years trying to make him the next Bruce Lee.
Snake in the Eagle’s Shadow (1978)
Released months before Drunken Master with the same director and star, and the cat-versus-snake material is the better piece of choreography. Hwang Jang-lee was a genuine taekwondo champion and it shows in every kick.
The Young Master (1980)
Chan’s first film as director for Golden Harvest, ending in a fight that runs close to twenty minutes and leaves him beaten half to death. The fan sequence is the most technically demanding thing in his early work.
Miracles (1989)
Chan directed a Capra remake set in thirties Hong Kong with enormous sets and almost no interest in fighting. The rope factory sequence is the exception and it is one of the best things he staged.
Crime Story (1993)
Kirk Wong directed Chan in a serious police film with no comedy at all, based on an actual kidnapping. Chan has said it is his favourite of his own work and the audience of 1993 disagreed completely.
The Big Boss (1971)
Bruce Lee’s first leading role, shot in Thailand in poor conditions, and the ice factory finale is where the screen persona arrives fully formed. It broke box office records across Asia immediately.
Way of the Dragon (1972)
Lee wrote and directed it himself and brought Chuck Norris to the Colosseum for the most famous duel in the form. The fight is slow, technical and about two philosophies instead of a result.
Executioners from Shaolin (1977)
Lau Kar-leung built a revenge film across a generation, with a crane style that cannot beat a specific opponent and a son trained to solve the problem his father could not. The anatomy of the final fight is genuinely technical.
Heroes of the East (1978)
Lau again, with a Chinese husband and a Japanese wife whose martial disagreement escalates into a tournament nobody wanted. It is the rare film in the form where nobody dies and the argument is about respect.
Dirty Ho (1979)
Lau Kar-leung staged a fight disguised as a wine tasting and another disguised as a man being helped to walk, and both are choreographed so that the violence is invisible to everybody in the room except the participants.
The Heroic Trio (1993)
Johnnie To put Anita Mui, Maggie Cheung and Michelle Yeoh in a film about stolen babies and an underground emperor, and the tone swings from comic book to horror without warning. All three are extraordinary in it.
Sonatine (1993)
Takeshi Kitano sent a yakuza crew to a beach to wait out a conflict, and most of the film is grown men playing games in sand. The violence arrives without warning and is over before anybody reacts.
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.
Terminator Salvation (2009)
The first film set in the future war the series had promised for twenty-five years, rated for a wider audience and built around a protagonist introduced in this film instead of around John Connor.
Alien Resurrection (1997)
Joss Whedon wrote it, Jean-Pierre Jeunet directed it, and the two sensibilities never meet. Ripley is cloned two hundred years later, removing the finality the previous film had earned.
Predator 2 (1990)
Moving the creature to Los Angeles is a defensible idea undone by a city that never feels dangerous and a protagonist the film cannot decide whether to admire. The Alien skull in the trophy case launched a franchise nobody needed.
The Predator (2018)
Shane Black wrote and directed a film that was substantially reshot, and the released version contains a subplot about autism as evolution that the picture states aloud and never examines.
Alien: Covenant (2017)
Ridley Scott answered questions from Prometheus that audiences had asked and removed the mystery in the process. The crew makes decisions the film has to excuse, including removing helmets on an unsurveyed world.
Expendables 3 (2014)
A series built on hard-R violence from performers who made their names in it, rated for teenagers, with the action cut so heavily that almost no exchange is legible. It leaked online before release and lost money.
What Do You Think?
This is the tier where a great premise meets an execution that cannot carry it. Logan’s Run and The Running Man are the clearest cases and Last Action Hero is the argument. Tell me whether that one belongs up a tier.
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