Part 7 – 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 Watchable |
Part 7: The Failures
The best decision in this tier is Reservoir Dogs, and it was forced. Tarantino couldn’t afford to stage the robbery, so he set the film entirely before and after it. A heist picture became a chamber piece about who talked.
The other pattern is the protagonist nobody would defend. Travis Bickle, Jack Carter, Harry Callahan and Carlito Brigante are all men the film declines to endorse, and each is more durable for it.
Bad films are easy to forgive. A film that had something and threw it away is not, and most of this page fits that description. A cheap exploitation picture that never aimed higher is just dull. A Best Picture winner that flatters its audience, or a Parker adaptation that files the edges off Parker, is a waste I take personally, because somebody had the material and the money and still blew it.
Every rating is the one carried by the review it links to. Ties are broken by year, and this is the third of seven parts.
Nineteen films that fail in nineteen identifiable ways, and every failure has a name. Learn to spot them before you commit them in the Awful Writing Handbook.
1. Savages (2012) [full review]
► Read the full review of Savages (2012)
RLR: 6 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 6.4/10
"Benicio del Toro and Salma Hayek are considerably more interesting than the three leads, and the film knows it."
Oliver Stone adapted Don Winslow’s novel and then supplied two endings, the first of which the narrator announces is a lie before the second one plays. That decision is the single clearest example in modern studio filmmaking of a director refusing to commit to his own material.
Blake Lively narrates and the film gives her almost nothing else to do. O is the object three men are fighting over, she’s kidnapped in the first act, and the voiceover keeps insisting on an interiority the screenplay never dramatizes. The narration is doing work the scenes should have done.
Winslow co-wrote the screenplay with Stone and Shane Salerno and has been diplomatic about the result in public. The novel ends once, hard, and the decision to shoot both a false version and a real one came out of the production and not off the page.
Benicio del Toro and Salma Hayek are giving performances the film around them doesn’t deserve. Lado is frightening in every scene and Elena is written with an actual arc, and both of them are stranded inside a picture more interested in Laguna Beach production design.
Del Toro and Hayek are the reason this gets a six from me, and I’d watch Lado threaten people for another hour. What sinks it is Stone’s refusal to pick an ending. Winslow wrote one hard ending and the film lost its nerve, and a crime story that won’t commit to what happened can’t expect me to commit to it either.
2. Parker (2013) [full review]
► Read the full review of Parker (2013)
RLR: 6 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 6.2/10
"Westlake refused to license the character’s name for decades unless a studio committed to a series, and then this happened."
Taylor Hackford adapted Richard Stark’s Flashfire and then made the one change that can’t be made: he gave Parker a code. The character in twenty-four novels is a professional thief with no loyalties and no principles, and this version doesn’t hurt people who don’t deserve it. Statham is well cast and given nothing to play. The absence of interiority defines the Parker of the books and the film keeps supplying motivation, a girlfriend, a dying father figure and a sense of fairness, all of which are additions and all of which flatten him.
Statham is the right man for Parker and I resent the film for wasting him. The whole appeal of those books is a thief who doesn’t care whether you like him, and Hackford spends the running time making sure you do. It’s watchable, and it’s the tamed version of a character whose entire value was that nobody could tame him.
Donald Westlake wrote the Parker books as Richard Stark across five decades and refused for most of that time to let the character’s name be used on screen. Mel Gibson’s Porter and Lee Marvin’s Walker are the same man under different names because of that refusal.
Jennifer Lopez’s real estate agent is the film’s other problem and it’s structural. She’s introduced forty minutes in, given a comic tone the rest of the picture doesn’t share, and the film keeps cutting to her financial difficulties while a heist is underway.
3. Hawkeye (2021) [full review]
► Read the full review of Hawkeye (2021)
RLR: 6 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.4/10
"A retired archer takes his children to New York for Christmas and finds somebody wearing his old costume."
Marvel built a six-episode Christmas series around the least interesting Avenger and then spent most of it on a track suit mafia, a deaf antagonist with a real grievance and a musical based on the Battle of New York. The parts are better than the whole by a wide margin.
Hailee Steinfeld’s Kate Bishop is the reason it works at all, and the series is smart enough to make her incompetence the comedy instead of her competence the fantasy. She’s enthusiastic, undertrained and frequently wrong, and Renner plays exhaustion opposite her. Steinfeld had been cast off an audition tape and Marvel built two later projects around the character.
The crime plot is the failure. A stolen watch, a costume, a criminal organization with no discernible business, and a final confrontation in which the actual villain is revealed to have been arranging everything for reasons the series never makes legible. The Christmas material is the only part with any shape.
4. Dahmer – Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story, “The Man in Apt. 213” [full review]
► Read the full review of Dahmer – Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story, “The Man in Apt. 213”
RLR: 5 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 8.1/10
"The series was widely criticized by victims’ families, several of whom stated publicly that they were never contacted."
Ryan Murphy opened the series from Tracy Edwards escaping in handcuffs and then jumped backward, and the first episode is the strongest in the run. Evan Peters plays Dahmer with a flat affect and no charisma at all, the correct and least commercial choice available.
The neighbor is the episode’s real subject. Glenda Cleveland, fictionalized here as Glenda Cleveland living next door, reported the smell and the sounds repeatedly and Milwaukee police ignored her for months, and the series is precise about what that failure required. Cleveland herself died in 2010 and her family objected to the portrayal after the series aired.
The ethical problem is the whole production and it doesn’t resolve. Several victims’ families said publicly they weren’t contacted, the show recreates their relatives’ deaths in detail, and Netflix’s own marketing traded on the name. The first episode is well made and the enterprise around it’s not defensible.
Netflix pulled the LGBTQ tag from the series listing after complaints within days of release, and several of the victims’ relatives published statements saying nobody involved in the production had ever contacted them. The series was the platform’s second most watched English-language title that year. The police material is the strongest content. Two officers return a bleeding fourteen-year-old to Dahmer’s apartment after he explains it’s a domestic matter, and the episode plays it in real time. That sequence is documented fact and it’s the argument the series should have been built on.
The police scene is the part I can’t forget. Two officers hand a bleeding boy back to his killer and the episode lets it play in full, and that’s the story I wanted the whole series to tell.
Peters makes the right choice with Dahmer and the first episode is well made. I still can’t get comfortable with a production that restaged real deaths without contacting several of the families, and that’s why it sits at a five.
Rage reveals its twist with eight minutes left and Fast X has no ending at all. Work out what a shape requires in the Story ARC Handbook.
5. 8MM (1999) [full review]
► Read the full review of 8MM (1999)
RLR: 5 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 6.5/10
"Andrew Kevin Walker wrote Se7en and this, and the difference is that Fincher withheld almost everything Schumacher shows."
Joel Schumacher directed Andrew Kevin Walker’s script and the two of them disagreed about the film during production and afterward. Walker wrote Se7en. Schumacher shot this one with a glossy surface and a redemptive arc that the material actively refuses, and the mismatch is visible in every reel.
Nicolas Cage plays a surveillance investigator hired to determine whether a film in a dead man’s safe is real, and the premise is strong. The first hour, working through distribution chains and pornographic bookshops, is a competent procedural about an ugly industry. Walker delivered the script to Columbia in 1995 and it sat for four years before Schumacher took it.
The second half converts it into a revenge picture and loses the argument. Machine carries a mask and is unmasked to be an ordinary man. That’s the film’s one good idea, and then the protagonist executes several people and goes home to his wife and the picture treats that as resolution.
Walker has said the shooting script diverged considerably from what he wrote and that he asked for the changes to be reversed before release. The finished film keeps his premise and discards the moral position underneath it. That’s the shortest available description of what went wrong.
The first hour of 8MM is a film I’d recommend. Cage working through the distribution chain is grim and patient, and the premise justifies its ugliness. Then it turns into a revenge picture and I lose interest. Schumacher took Walker’s script about an industry and shrank it to one bad man and a gun, and the ending asks me to feel resolved about a question the film never answered.
6. Rage (2014) [full review]
► Read the full review of Rage (2014)
RLR: 5 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 5.1/10
"A reformed criminal’s daughter is taken and he reassembles his old crew to work through the people he thinks did it."
Paco Cabezas directed Nicolas Cage in a revenge film where the people he spends the film killing turn out not to have killed the daughter, and the reveal arrives after every one of them is already dead. The structure is a man committing a massacre for no reason.
The film was shot in Alabama in under a month and released to roughly two hundred screens. Cage was in the middle of a stretch where he was making four or five pictures a year, and this is the one that best illustrates what that schedule produces.
That premise could work and the film has no idea it’s holding it. A reckoning about what revenge costs when the grievance is wrong would be a real picture. This one plays the killings as action, delivers the reveal as a twist, and then ends without anybody accounting for anything.
Cage is committed in a film that doesn’t support him, the story of a decade of his output. The flashbacks to the Balkans are underlit and incoherent, the Russian mob plot never connects, and Danny Glover is given a police role with roughly four lines of function.
7. Angel (1984) [full review]
► Read the full review of Angel (1984)
RLR: 4 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 5.5/10
"The premise is delivered entirely in the marketing. That is the problem: a high school student by day and nothing else."
Robert Vincent O’Neill built the entire film on one marketing line about an honor student by day and a Hollywood prostitute by night, and the picture never develops past the premise. Molly is fifteen, the film is aware of that, and it shoots her on the Boulevard repeatedly anyway.
The supporting cast is the only thing worth anything. Rory Calhoun as a retired cowboy actor, Dick Shawn as a street performer, and Susan Tyrrell as a landlady are all playing real characters in a film with no interest in them. Their scenes are the only ones with a pulse.
New World released it in January 1984 and it took around eighteen million dollars against a small budget, the only reason the sequel arrived the following year. Donna Wilkes was twenty-four playing fifteen and has spoken since about how the marketing around her was handled. The killer is a plot device with no interiority and no method worth following, and the police investigation exists to move Molly between locations. The film is exploitation wearing a social conscience it never pays for, and the sequel the following year drops the pretense entirely.
Angel makes me uncomfortable in the wrong way. The film knows Molly is fifteen and keeps putting her on the Boulevard for the camera anyway, and the social concern it claims is a cover story. The only people I cared about were the old pros in the supporting cast, and the film treats them as scenery.
8. Stripped to Kill (1987) [full review]
► Read the full review of Stripped to Kill (1987)
RLR: 5 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 5.0/10
"Katt Shea was a genuine talent working inside an exploitation contract, and two or three sequences prove it."
Katt Shea directed for Roger Corman on a tight schedule and the film is a police procedural built around an undercover officer working a Los Angeles strip club while dancers are murdered. The structure is entirely a delivery mechanism for the club footage. Corman gave Shea the assignment after she pitched him a different film entirely and he said no to that one.
Shea is a better director than the assignment permitted and there are two or three sequences with real tension in them. The alley pursuit and the final reveal are staged with real spatial sense, and her later films confirm the talent was there under the brief.
The mystery is unworkable. The killer’s identity depends on a physical impossibility the film hopes nobody examines, the motive is delivered in a monologue during the last two minutes, and the investigation consists of a detective watching performances and getting no closer to anything. Shea went on to direct Poison Ivy and The Rage: Carrie 2, and neither has this film’s constraints.
Most of these were fixable at the script stage and nobody did the pass. Learn what a real revision looks like in the Revisions Handbook.
9. Crash (2005) [full review]
► Read the full review of Crash (2005)
RLR: 4 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.7/10
"Every scene exists to make a point and nobody in it behaves like a person. That is the objection and it holds."
Paul Haggis won Best Picture for a film about racism in Los Angeles that works entirely on coincidence. Every character meets every other character, each encounter delivers a lesson, and the film’s structure requires a city of ten million people to contain roughly twelve. Haggis said the idea came from his own carjacking in Los Angeles in 1991.
Haggis shot it for around six and a half million dollars with an ensemble who mostly worked for scale, and Lionsgate picked it up out of Toronto. It took ninety-eight million worldwide and the campaign that followed is still studied as the most effective independent Oscar push ever run. The individual performances are frequently strong and the writing around them isn’t. Matt Dillon’s officer assaults a woman during a traffic stop and then rescues her from a burning car, and the film presents this as complexity instead of a screenwriter arranging a moral.
The core problem is that the film flatters its audience. Every character is racist, everybody learns something, and nobody is implicated structurally. The film presents racism as a personal failing that a sufficiently dramatic afternoon can correct, the most comfortable possible position. It cost around six and a half million dollars and took ninety-eight million worldwide.
Crash is far too pleased with itself. Every coincidence lands a lesson right on cue, and the film sends the audience home feeling better about itself for having watched. A message picture can work. This one rigs an entire city so the message can’t miss, and the Academy handed it Best Picture for the trouble.
Its Best Picture win over Brokeback Mountain is still cited as one of the Academy’s worst decisions, and Haggis himself said years later that it shouldn’t have won. The film has aged into a case study about what awards reward. Haggis told The Hollywood Reporter in 2015 that it wasn’t the best film of the year and shouldn’t have won.
10. The Forger (2014) [full review]
► Read the full review of The Forger (2014)
RLR: 4 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 5.5/10
"A forger negotiates early release to spend time with his dying son, and the film montages past the forging."
Philip Martin directed John Travolta as an art forger who gets out of prison early to spend time with a dying son and has to steal a Monet to pay for the release. Every element in that sentence is a good premise and none of them connect on screen.
Which story it’s telling is something the film can’t decide. The heist is underwritten, the father-son material is sentimental, the cancer subplot exists to supply urgency, and Christopher Plummer is given a grandfather role that the script uses as comic relief and then abandons. Travolta was fifty-nine and the film was shot in Massachusetts over roughly six weeks.
It went to a limited release and video on demand in the same week, where a picture goes when the distributor has read the reviews early and decided to cut its losses. Travolta produced it himself through his own production company and took the lead as well. Travolta is trying and the direction gives him nothing. The forgery process is the one thing in the film nobody else does, and it, is compressed into a montage. A picture about an art forger that won’t show the forging has discarded its own most interesting asset.
This one hurts more than its rating suggests, because the forging is right there. A man who can fake a Monet is a film I’d watch tomorrow. What the picture delivers instead is a sentimental father and son story with a heist bolted on, and the one skill that makes Travolta’s character interesting gets a montage.
11. Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile (2019) [full review]
► Read the full review of Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile (2019)
RLR: 4 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 6.6/10
"Zac Efron plays Bundy and the structure keeps the audience at his girlfriend’s distance, then keeps breaking it."
Joe Berlinger made a documentary series about Ted Bundy and a dramatic feature about him in the same year, and the feature is the weaker object. Zac Efron plays Bundy from the perspective of his girlfriend, so the audience spends most of the film not knowing for certain what he did.
The conceit is defensible and the execution undermines it. Withholding the crimes to replicate Liz’s experience is a real idea, and the film keeps cutting to courtroom charisma, fan mail and Efron’s performance of charm, producing exactly the glamorization the structure was meant to avoid.
Lily Collins is doing the actual work and the film keeps leaving her. Liz’s slow recognition, her drinking, her refusal to be certain, are the strongest material in the picture and they’re repeatedly interrupted for trial coverage the audience has seen in the documentary.
12. Street Girls (1975) [full review]
► Read the full review of Street Girls (1975)
RLR: 3 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 4.5/10
"A father searching for his daughter in Portland finds an exploitation cycle instead of a story."
Michael Miller directed a film about a father searching Portland for a missing daughter and it’s barely assembled. The plot is a series of encounters with no escalation, the sound is frequently unusable, and the daughter is absent for most of the running time the search is meant to be about. The material it spends time on buries whatever social intent existed. It foregrounds the exploitation content and the father’s search is a frame around it, the standard arrangement for the period and doesn’t become less cynical for being standard. Barry Levinson co-wrote it, four years before Diner, the only reason anybody encounters it now. There’s no visible sign of the writer he became and the script has no structure to speak of. Levinson has never discussed it publicly and no retrospective of his work includes it.
Parker gave its lead a conscience and removed the reason he existed. Build a protagonist who survives adaptation in the Protagonist Handbook.
13. The New York Ripper (1982) [full review]
► Read the full review of The New York Ripper (1982)
RLR: 3 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 5.8/10
"Lucio Fulci’s film is among the most unpleasant in the giallo cycle and was refused classification in Britain."
Lucio Fulci made a giallo in New York in which the killer quacks like a duck while murdering women. That detail is the only thing anybody remembers. The film was refused certification in the United Kingdom and the print was deported instead of returned.
The violence is the point and it’s aimed almost entirely at women, filmed in extended close-up, and staged with a hostility the genre doesn’t require. Fulci made good films. This one is deliberately unpleasant and the deliberateness isn’t a defense. Fulci had made Zombie and The Beyond in the preceding three years and both are better films.
The procedural half is competent and irrelevant. A detective, a psychoanalyst, a sequence of clues, and a solution that arrives through coincidence instead of investigation. The film has no interest in the plot and neither does the audience it was made for. The British print was seized in 1982 and the film remained banned there for over two decades.
This one is repellent. Fulci could make a good horror film, so the cruelty here is a choice he made on purpose, and that’s harder to forgive than incompetence. Strip away the duck voice and what’s left is a camera lingering on women being hurt, attached to a solution that turns up by coincidence. I found nothing in it worth defending.
14. Avenging Angel (1985) [full review]
► Read the full review of Avenging Angel (1985)
RLR: 3 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 4.8/10
"The protagonist is at university studying law, having been taken in and supported, and returns to the Boulevard anyway."
Robert Vincent O’Neill returned for the sequel with a different lead and a premise that’s Molly in law school and returning to the Boulevard to avenge the officer who saved her. The film has dropped every trace of the social framing and kept the setting.
Betsy Russell replaces Donna Wilkes and the recasting removes the one thing the original had: an actor who seemed uncomfortable. This version is confident, competent and at ease, and the character makes no sense at all as a result. Wilkes was twenty-four when she made the original and had turned down the sequel over the script.
Rory Calhoun and Susan Tyrrell return and are again the best thing in it, a grim observation about a film built on a young woman’s trauma. The revenge plot is mechanical and the villain is a real estate developer, the sequel reaching for relevance and finding none.
15. Streetwalkin’ (1985) [full review]
► Read the full review of Streetwalkin’ (1985)
RLR: 5 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 5.1/10
"A young woman arrives in New York from New Jersey with her younger brother and is recruited within a day."
Joan Freeman directed and co-wrote a film about a teenage runaway in New York and it’s more serious than its shelf-mates, a low bar cleared by a narrow margin. Melissa Leo is in her first lead role and is better than the material.
The pimp is the film’s entire antagonist structure and Dale Midkiff plays him at one volume for eighty minutes. There’s no organization, no economics and no world around him, so the film becomes a chase with no context for why anybody can’t simply leave.
The New York location work is a real asset too. Times Square before the cleanup, shot at night on real streets, and the film accidentally preserves a place that no longer exists.
Leo’s performance and those streets earn it a 5, and the hour of repetitive chase keeps it from going any higher. Leo was twenty-four and went on to win an Academy Award twenty-five years later for The Fighter.
16. Cash Out (2024) [full review]
► Read the full review of Cash Out (2024)
RLR: 3 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 4.8/10
"A master thief leads a bank robbery that turns into a siege, two well-understood structures bolted together badly."
Ives directed John Travolta through a bank siege assembled entirely from genre furniture. A crew, a betrayal, a hostage negotiation conducted by radio, a brother with a grudge, and a twist visible from the opening sequence.
Nothing in it’s been thought about twice. Travolta made three similar films in eighteen months and this is the one that reached the widest release.
Every character carries exactly one trait and announces it. The tech expert is the tech expert, the loose cannon is the loose cannon, and the negotiator has a personal history with the lead that the film mentions three times without ever dramatizing. The dialogue is function with no voice on it.
Two sequels were shot back to back with the same cast on the same schedule. That explains a great deal about how the first one is constructed. The economics of that arrangement are visible in every reused location and every scene that runs on two actors.
Convenience, not tension, drives the choice of the siege structure. Confining the action to a bank means nobody has to be moved anywhere, and the radio negotiation means two actors can film their scenes separately. The film is built around production savings and it shows in every cut.
Cash Out makes me tired. Every scene feels budgeted before it was written, and I can see the spreadsheet through the lens. Travolta deserves better material, and so does anyone who pressed play. The two sequels shot on the same schedule are the part I find hardest to take, because they mean nobody stopped to ask whether the first one worked.
Angel has a premise and no story, and the difference is the whole problem. Learn to tell them apart in the Plot Handbook.
17. Gotti (2018) [full review]
► Read the full review of Gotti (2018)
RLR: 2 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 4.9/10
"It went through multiple directors and financiers across a decade before Kevin Connolly completed it."
Kevin Connolly directed and the film carried a zero on Rotten Tomatoes for a period, rare enough to be worth stating. Travolta spent years trying to get it made, the production went through several directors, and the result has no argument about its own subject.
The structure is the fundamental problem. The film jumps across three decades using title cards, the makeup ages nobody convincingly, and the film presents events in a sequence that assumes the audience already knows the chronology. There’s no through-line and no question being pursued. Barry Levinson, Nick Cassavetes and Joe Johnston were all attached at points during the decade it took.
The position on Gotti is the other failure. The film admires him without making a case, closing on documentary footage of real people praising the man, and a picture that ends by outsourcing its argument to a crowd hasn’t made one. The distributor publicly attacked critics in its own marketing, the other thing anybody remembers.
Gotti is infuriating in a way most bad films aren’t.
A picture about a mob boss can admire him or condemn him and still be worth watching, as long as it argues its case. This one skips the argument, rolls footage of admirers at the end, and then the distributor went after the critics who noticed. That’s contempt for the audience, and it deserves the two.
18. Fast X (2023) [full review]
► Read the full review of Fast X (2023)
RLR: 2 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 5.7/10
"Leterrier inherited a running production, delivered no ending, and added a character who was present all along."
Louis Leterrier took over from Justin Lin days into production and delivered a film that spends two and a half hours setting up a sequel. There’s no ending. The picture stops mid-sequence with roughly six characters in unresolved jeopardy and a title card. Lin left over creative differences a week into shooting and Leterrier inherited a production already running.
Jason Momoa is doing something entertaining and it belongs in a different film. Dante is camp, chatty and enjoying himself, and every scene he’s in works. Every scene he’s not in is a cast of fifteen delivering exposition about family in separate locations.
Universal announced the picture as the first half of a two-part finale and then added a third film to the plan, so the ending that’s missing here has now been deferred twice over. Momoa is the only element that every review of the film agreed on.
The franchise has lost the ability to generate stakes. Characters return from confirmed deaths, physics is optional, and a car survives a fall that would kill everyone in it. Nothing that happens can be trusted to stay happened, so nothing that happens matters. The budget was reported at around three hundred and forty million dollars, among the highest ever.
Nothing in this franchise can stay dead anymore, and Fast X is where I stopped caring. Momoa is having a wonderful time and he’s the only part of it I’d sit through again. A film that runs two and a half hours and then ends on a title card is treating its audience like a subscription, and I resent being billed for half a story.
19. Gigli (2003) [full review]
► Read the full review of Gigli (2003)
RLR: 1 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 2.6/10
"It was rewritten during production into something nobody involved had agreed to make, and the result ended a career."
Martin Brest wrote and directed it, the production was rewritten around the leads’ relationship during shooting, and it took just over six million dollars against a seventy-five million budget. Brest hasn’t directed a film since and the picture ended a career that included Midnight Run and Scent of a Woman.
The premise is a kidnapping. Two low-level criminals hold a federal prosecutor’s brother, who has a developmental disability, and the film’s treatment of that character is the most indefensible thing in it. He exists to be funny and the film has no other use for him.
Brest had made Beverly Hills Cop, Midnight Run and Scent of a Woman before this, a run of commercial and critical success almost nobody in his generation matched. He hasn’t directed anything in the twenty-two years since and has given no interviews explaining why.
The dialogue is the reason it’s remembered. Long speeches about anatomy, a monologue comparing body parts in an argument about attraction, and an extended sequence of flirtation that neither performer can make land.
The scenes run several minutes past any point they had. Brest has said the studio recut it considerably and that the released version isn’t the film he delivered.
There’s a real film underneath about two criminals discovering they’re not good at crime, and Christopher Walken and Al Pacino each appear for one scene in what looks like that version. Both scenes are considerably better than anything around them and both are over in minutes.
The waste is the worst thing about Gigli. Brest made Midnight Run, and the Walken and Pacino scenes prove somebody on that set still knew how to make this work. Everything else is a crap film built around a joke at the expense of a disabled character, and a 1 is generous.
Honorable Mentions: Better Films Without a Review Here Yet
After nineteen failures, here are twelve crime films with no review on the site that are worth an evening instead.
Criss Cross (1949)
Robert Siodmak put Burt Lancaster in an armored car robbery he joins to stay near an ex-wife who’s married to a gangster. The heist is told in flashback from a hospital bed and the ending is among the bleakest in American noir.
Act of Violence (1948)
Fred Zinnemann sent Robert Ryan after Van Heflin across postwar Los Angeles over something that happened in a prison camp. The moral position inverts at the midpoint and the film never lets either man be simply right.
The Big Combo (1955)
Joseph H. Lewis and John Alton made the most beautifully photographed noir ever shot on a budget this small. The final scene in fog on an airfield is the most reproduced image in the genre and it’s earned.
Pickup on South Street (1953)
Samuel Fuller put a pickpocket in the middle of a Cold War espionage plot he has no interest in, and Thelma Ritter steals the film as an informant selling names to fund her own funeral.
Gun Crazy (1950)
Joseph H. Lewis shot a bank robbery in one unbroken take from the back seat of a car, with dialogue improvised on the day, twenty years before anybody else tried it. Peggy Cummins drives the whole picture.
Detour (1945)
Edgar G. Ulmer made it in six days for almost nothing and produced the purest fatalist noir in the canon. The narrator insists he’s unlucky and the film supplies evidence that he’s lying.
The American Friend (1977)
Wim Wenders adapted Patricia Highsmith with Dennis Hopper as Ripley and Bruno Ganz as a dying framer talked into two murders. The train sequence is among the most sustained pieces of suspense of the decade.
Army of Shadows (1969)
Melville made a Resistance film with no heroism in it whatsoever, about people executing their own colleagues to protect a network. It went unreleased in the United States for thirty-seven years.
Le Doulos (1962)
Melville again, with Jean-Paul Belmondo as an informer who may not be one, in a film that withholds the answer until a final sequence that reframes every earlier scene. The nine-minute interrogation take is the set piece.
The Mission (1999)
Johnnie To put five bodyguards in a shopping mall at night and produced the best-staged standoff in Hong Kong cinema, built entirely on stillness. Nobody moves for minutes at a time and the tension is unbearable.
Exiled (2006)
To again, in Macau, with a crew who can’t decide whether to kill a friend or protect him and resolve it by flipping a coin. The clinic shootout is choreographed like a dance and the film knows exactly how absurd it is.
Nameless Gangster (2012)
Yoon Jong-bin followed a corrupt customs officer through the Korean crackdowns of the eighties and nineties, and Choi Min-sik plays him as a man whose only skill is knowing who’s related to whom.
Dishonorable Mentions: Even Worse, and Unreviewed
These sit below the floor of a page that already contains Gigli. No reviews here yet and none are planned with any urgency.
The Devil’s Own (1997)
Alan Pakula directing Harrison Ford and Brad Pitt through an IRA gunrunning plot that Ford publicly said had no finished script when shooting began. The two leads are acting in different films and the ending was rewritten repeatedly during production.
Killerman (2019)
Liam Hemsworth plays a money launderer with amnesia, two premises fighting each other for ninety minutes. The film keeps explaining its own plot in flashback and the explanations don’t reconcile with one another.
Stolen (2012)
Simon West and Nicolas Cage made a heist film in New Orleans that reuses the Taken premise without any of the competence. The daughter is in a taxi trunk for the entire running time and the film can’t find anything for her to do.
Hangman (2017)
Al Pacino and Karl Urban hunt a serial killer who leaves hangman puzzles, in a film where a character solves the puzzle by simply guessing correctly. The journalist subplot exists to supply exposition and nothing else.
Rock the Kasbah (2015)
Barry Levinson and Bill Murray in Afghanistan, in a comedy that treats a war zone as a backdrop for a manager finding a singer. The tonal misjudgment is total and the film was pulled from wide release inside two weeks.
Swept Away (2002)
Guy Ritchie directing Madonna in a remake of a Lina Wertmuller film about class and power, with all of the politics removed. It took under a million dollars worldwide and effectively ended her film career.
What Do You Think?
This is the bottom of the ranking and the ordering matters less than the reasons. Crash at a 4 with a Best Picture win and Gigli at a 1 are doing very different kinds of failing. Most of these films had a real idea in them somewhere, and watching people with money and talent smother it is a bigger sin than any cheap picture made by people who never had a chance. Tell me which one on this page you think is rated too harshly.
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 Watchable |
Part 7: The Failures
