Part 8 – The Flawed
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 Failures
Almost everything in this tier has a premise worth more than the film made from it. Gattaca imagines genetic discrimination as bureaucracy instead of dystopia and then runs a murder plot through it. Minority Report argues against predictive control and cannot commit to the darkness that requires. World War Z adapts an oral history by discarding the oral history.
The pattern is instructive because it 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.
Every rating is the one carried by the review it links to. Ties are broken by year, and this is the eighth of nine parts.
Savages takes its ending back, Basic reverses once too often and Rage plants nothing. Three ways to lose a reader at the end, examined in the Plot Handbook.
1. 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 DEA 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. Screwface’s 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 film adds a disclaimer that nobody believed. Twentieth Century Fox released it in October 1990. Fox added a card at the end stating the film was not about Jamaicans generally.
The action is well shot and brutally direct. Seagal’s aikido style 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.
2. Natural Born Killers (1994) [full review]
► Read the full review of Natural Born Killers (1994)
RLR: 6 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.2/10
"A satire about media sensationalism that is itself the most sensational film of its year."
Oliver Stone took a Quentin Tarantino script, rewrote it substantially enough that Tarantino took a story credit and disowned the result, and made a film that switches film stocks, aspect ratios and formats roughly every ninety seconds. Tarantino sold the original script for around ten thousand dollars in 1990.
The technique is the argument and it is exhausting by design. Thirty-five millimetre, sixteen, Super 8, video, animation, back projection, black and white, and Stone has said he wanted the audience in the condition the media produces. Robert Downey Jr. plays the tabloid journalist and Tommy Lee Jones the warden.
Woody Harrelson and Juliette Lewis are genuinely committed and the sitcom sequence with Rodney Dangerfield is the one piece of the film where the method and the content fit. A laugh track over child abuse, played straight. The film was banned outright in Ireland and heavily cut in Britain.
The film is frequently accused of being the thing it satirizes and the accusation sticks. It is more interested in the kills than in the critique, several copycat crimes were attributed to it in court, and Stone’s defense has never fully answered that. Hans Bachmann and Brian Berdan edited roughly three thousand cuts into it.
3. Broken Arrow (1996) [full review]
► Read the full review of Broken Arrow (1996)
RLR: 6 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 6.1/10
"Woo’s second American 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 around it. 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. 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 brought from Hong Kong and the film is competent where it could have been distinctive. Woo had made Hard Target in 1993 as his American debut.
4. Gattaca (1997) [full review]
► Read the full review of Gattaca (1997)
RLR: 6 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.7/10
"One of the best premises in nineties science fiction, running a murder plot through it."
Andrew Niccol’s first film is beautiful, precisely designed, and rests on a premise that does not survive examination. A genetically inferior man assumes another’s identity to reach a space programme in a society that screens everybody constantly. Ethan Hawke and Uma Thurman met on the production and married two years later.
The production design is the achievement. Mid-century modern architecture, the Marin County Civic Center as the facility, dark suits, and Slawomir Idziak shooting everything through gold and green filters. It looks like nothing else from the decade. Michael Nyman scored it and the main theme is the most remembered thing in it.
The central problem is the security. A society this obsessed with genetic verification runs no photographic identification, no biometric cross-check and no supervision of sample collection, and the entire plot requires all three failures at once. It cost around thirty-six million dollars and took under thirteen.
Jude Law is the film’s best element and gets the material nobody discusses. Jerome is paralysed, bitter, an actual genetic elite who failed anyway, and his ending is the only part of the picture that earns its weight. Gore Vidal appears as the mission director.
Gattaca screens everybody genetically and issues no photo ID. Stress a system against your own plot before you commit to it, using the World Builder’s Handbook.
5. Minority Report (2002) [full review]
► Read the full review of Minority Report (2002)
RLR: 6 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.6/10
"An argument against predictive control, made by somebody too Spielberg to commit."
Spielberg assembled fifteen specialists for a three-day workshop to design the 2054 setting, and the predictive technology, gesture interfaces and targeted advertising in the film have aged into documentary. The world-building is exceptional. Philip K. Dick’s story was published in 1956 and runs about forty pages.
The bleach-bypass processing gives it a silver, drained look that Janusz Kaminski pushed further than the studio wanted, and the film is visually distinct from everything else in Spielberg’s catalogue. Scott Frank and Jon Cohen share the screenplay credit. Kaminski had shot Schindler’s List and Saving Private Ryan for Spielberg.
Spielberg convened fifteen specialists for a three-day workshop before production began, and asked them to design the world of 2054 as a working system instead of a set. The gesture interfaces, retina-targeted advertising and predictive policing they produced have aged into something close to documentary footage.
The premise collapses under its own reveal. Precrime works by consensus among three precogs, minority reports exist and are suppressed, and once the film establishes that the visions can diverge it has removed the basis for every arrest already made. Colin Farrell plays the federal investigator and Max von Sydow the director.
The eyeball sequence, the spider drones and the mag-lev pursuit are all excellent and the last act is a conventional conspiracy with a suicide plan too elaborate to work. The film runs nearly two and a half hours and the final thirty are the weakest.
6. CSI: Miami / CSI: NY – The Henry Darius Crossover (2005) [full review]
► Read the full review of CSI: Miami / CSI: NY – The Henry Darius Crossover (2005)
RLR: 6 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.0/10
"A two-part crossover with a better structure than either series usually managed."
CBS ran a two-part crossover between CSI: Miami and CSI: NY in November 2005, with a killer transported between jurisdictions who escapes in the gap between episodes. It is the most ambitious thing either series attempted. The two episodes aired on consecutive nights in November 2005.
Kim Coates plays Henry Darius across both hours and the performance holds them together. He is articulate, bored and entirely without remorse, and he gets the only material in either show written for an actor instead of for a procedure. David Caruso and Gary Sinise lead the two casts respectively.
The structural problem is that the two series have incompatible tones. Miami is saturated orange with sunglasses and one-liners, New York is desaturated blue with grief, and the handoff between them is jarring enough to break the story in half. Anthony Zuiker created all three CSI series for CBS.
7. I Am Legend (2007) [full review]
► Read the full review of I Am Legend (2007)
RLR: 6 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.2/10
"An hour of the best empty-city work ever filmed, and an ending that inverts the title."
Francis Lawrence shot the best empty-New York footage ever put on film. Six blocks of Fifth Avenue closed, a deserted Times Square, grass through the pavement, and Will Smith alone in it with a dog for the first hour. Matheson published the novel in 1954 and it has been filmed three times.
The first hour is genuinely excellent. Neville’s routines, the mannequins in the video store, the recorded broadcasts, the dog, and the sequence where he finally speaks to a mannequin is the best thing Smith has done. Akiva Goldsman and Mark Protosevich wrote the screenplay. Abbey the German Shepherd was trained over roughly six months for the part.
The infected are the failure. The production shot practical performers and replaced them with computer-generated creatures that look wrong in every scene, and Richard Matheson’s entire point was that they are a functioning society. Alice Braga and Charlie Tahan appear in the last act. Matheson has said the infected as a society is the whole point of the novel.
The theatrical ending inverts the novel completely. Matheson’s Neville realizes he is the monster in the new world’s mythology. That is where the title comes from. The released film has him detonate a grenade and the alternate ending restores the original idea. It took over five hundred and eighty million dollars worldwide.
8. Savages (2012) [full review]
► Read the full review of Savages (2012)
RLR: 6 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 6.5/10
"Stone adapting Winslow, and the ending is offered twice."
Oliver Stone adapted Don Winslow and the first two acts are the best work he had done in a decade. Two friends running a boutique marijuana operation in Laguna Beach, a Mexican cartel demanding a partnership, and an escalation neither side wanted. Winslow published the novel in 2010 and co-wrote the screenplay.
Benicio del Toro and Salma Hayek are the film. Lado is genuinely frightening in a way Stone’s villains usually are not, and Elena is a cartel head managing a business and a daughter who does not know what she does. John Travolta and Emile Hirsch appear in supporting parts.
Don Winslow published the novel in 2010 and co-wrote the screenplay with Shane Salerno and Stone himself. The book ends where the film first appears to end, and the substitution that follows it was added entirely for the picture and has been defended by nobody involved.
The two protagonists are the weak point by a wide margin. Taylor Kitsch and Aaron Taylor-Johnson are given a philosophy-and-violence pairing that never develops, and Blake Lively’s narration is flat enough that the film opens by drawing attention to it. It was shot largely in Laguna Beach and Mexico.
The ending is unforgivable. Stone plays the tragic conclusion, holds it, and then reveals it as the narrator’s invention and replays the scene with everybody surviving. It retroactively removes the stakes from the entire film. Stone had made W. and Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps before this.
9. The Purge (2013) [full review]
► Read the full review of The Purge (2013)
RLR: 6 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 5.7/10
"A premise the size of a franchise, executed as one home invasion."
James DeMonaco made it for three million dollars and it took nearly ninety. That is why four sequels and a series exist. The premise is that all crime is legal for twelve hours annually, and the film does almost nothing with it. Universal and Blumhouse released it in June 2013.
The execution is a standard home invasion. Ethan Hawke and Lena Headey in a fortified suburban house, a stranger let inside by their son, and masked attackers outside demanding him back. Any of that works without the premise. Max Burkholder and Adelaide Kane play the two children.
The economics are stated and do not hold. Unemployment at one percent, crime eliminated, and the film asserts a causal link that requires the audience to accept that a single annual night accounts for an entire functioning society. Rhys Wakefield plays the polite stranger leading the masked group.
Broken Arrow gives the villain all the fun and Marked for Death gives him all the writing. What happens when the opposition wins the page is in the Antagonist Handbook.
10. Tenet (2020) [full review]
► Read the full review of Tenet (2020)
RLR: 6 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.3/10
"A film that tells you not to understand it and then requires you to."
Nolan spent around two hundred million dollars on a film built around entropy inversion, shot in seven countries, with practical sequences including a real Boeing 747 driven into a hangar. The ambition is not in question. It was one of the few major releases to attempt a theatrical run in 2020.
The sound mix is the defining complaint and it is deliberate. Nolan has defended burying dialogue under Ludwig Goransson’s score as an artistic choice, and the result is a film with complex exposition the audience frequently cannot hear. Elizabeth Debicki, Kenneth Branagh and Michael Caine fill out the cast.
Nolan bought a retired Boeing 747 outright and drove it into a hangar, on the basis that acquiring the aircraft cost less than building the sequence with visual effects. It is a decision that explains both what the film does well and what it does not.
John David Washington’s character has no name and almost no interior life. The Protagonist is a function moving through a plot, and Nolan has said that is the point, a defensible position and a cold one. Hoyte van Hoytema shot it on film in seven countries.
Robert Pattinson’s Neil is the only warmth in it and the film’s best idea lives in him. Their friendship has already happened from his side and is beginning from the Protagonist’s, and the last conversation carries the weight the rest of the film does not.
11. Leviathan (1989) [full review]
► Read the full review of Leviathan (1989)
RLR: 5 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 5.8/10
"One of three underwater creature films released in the same year."
George Cosmatos made one of three underwater monster films released in 1989, and it is the most openly derivative of them. A mining crew on the sea floor finds a Soviet wreck and a genetic experiment. The Abyss and DeepStar Six were released within months of it.
The cast is far better than the material. Peter Weller, Richard Crenna, Ernie Hudson, Daniel Stern and Hector Elizondo are all doing honest work in a film that is Alien underwater with the serial numbers barely removed. David Peoples and Jeb Stuart share the screenplay credit.
Stan Winston built the creature and the practical effects are genuinely good. The merged bodies, the progressive transformation and the final form all hold up, and the film should have trusted them more than it does. Amanda Pays and Lisa Eilbacher complete the crew. Winston had built the creatures for Aliens and Predator in the preceding years.
12. New Rose Hotel (1998) [full review]
► Read the full review of New Rose Hotel (1998)
RLR: 5 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 4.9/10
"Ferrara adapting Gibson, and the last half hour is surveillance footage of the first hour."
Abel Ferrara adapted a William Gibson short story with Christopher Walken, Willem Dafoe and Asia Argento, and the result is closer to an experimental film than to a thriller. Corporate headhunters attempt to extract a scientist. Gibson published the story in Omni in 1984. Gibson has been broadly positive about the adaptation in interviews since.
The last forty minutes are a repetition. Ferrara replays footage the audience has already seen, in fragments, as Dafoe’s character reconstructs what happened, and the technique is either the point of the film or an admission there was not enough footage. Ferrara had made Bad Lieutenant and The Addiction before this.
Walken is extraordinary and largely unmoored. His scenes have the rhythm of somebody improvising confidently in a film with no fixed shape, and the pleasure of watching him is the only reliable thing in it. Yoshitaka Amano is credited on the production design. He had worked with Ferrara before on The Addiction and King of New York.
13. 8MM (1999) [full review]
► Read the full review of 8MM (1999)
RLR: 5 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 6.5/10
"Written by the man who wrote Se7en, and it has none of the restraint."
Joel Schumacher directed Andrew Kevin Walker’s script two years after Walker wrote Se7en, and the two films share a preoccupation and almost nothing else. A private investigator is hired to determine whether a film found in a safe is real. Walker wrote Se7en in 1995 and this two years afterward.
The first hour is genuinely good. Nicolas Cage’s Tom Welles working methodically through missing persons files, a mother in a Cleveland kitchen, and Joaquin Phoenix as a pornography store clerk who becomes the film’s only likeable character. James Gandolfini and Peter Stormare play two of the men involved.
The second half abandons the investigation for revenge and the film’s argument collapses. Welles kills everybody involved and the picture treats this as resolution, precisely the moral simplicity the first hour refused. Schumacher had made Batman and Robin two years before. Welles returns home at the end and the film treats that as a conclusion.
The antagonists are a disappointment by design and the film says so. There is no conspiracy, no organization, just ordinary men doing it for money, and the unmasking scene is the one idea the last act gets right. It cost around forty million dollars and took roughly ninety-six.
Assault on Wall Street writes every victim as indefensible and removes the choice entirely. What a cost actually buys you is covered in the Showing and Telling Handbook.
14. Basic (2003) [full review]
► Read the full review of Basic (2003)
RLR: 5 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 6.4/10
"Every account contradicts the others, and the resolution does not justify it."
John McTiernan made it two years after Rollerball and the film is a Rashomon structure applied to a Panama training exercise gone wrong. Six rangers went out, two came back, and every account contradicts the last. James Vanderbilt wrote it and went on to write Zodiac four years later.
John Travolta and Connie Nielsen conduct the interrogations and the first hour works. Each version reframes the previous one, the film holds its nerve, and the accumulating contradictions genuinely engage. Samuel L. Jackson plays the sergeant at the center of every account. Tim Daly and Giovanni Ribisi appear across the conflicting accounts.
The final reveal requires expository dialogue to explain the preceding ninety minutes, and once the explanation arrives none of the earlier scenes can be squared with it. The film stacked more reversals than the structure could carry. It was shot in Florida standing in for Panama.
15. Assault on Wall Street (2013) [full review]
► Read the full review of Assault on Wall Street (2013)
RLR: 5 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 6.2/10
"A vigilante film aimed at a target audiences genuinely resented, and it is blunt."
Uwe Boll made a film in which a security guard whose wife dies after his savings are wiped out by a fraudulent fund begins killing financial executives. The premise is topical and the execution is not subtle. Boll has directed more than thirty features, mostly video game adaptations.
Dominic Purcell plays Jim Baxford with genuine commitment and the first two thirds are better than Boll’s reputation suggests. The accumulation of legal letters, denied appeals and administrative refusals is patiently built. Erin Karpluk, John Heard and Edward Furlong appear in supporting parts. The foreclosure sequence runs several minutes with no dialogue at all.
The film’s position is unambiguous and it does not pretend otherwise. Boll endorses the killings, the victims are written as uniformly contemptible, and there is no character anywhere who complicates the argument. It was shot in Vancouver on a small budget. Boll has been explicit in interviews about what he intended the film to say.
16. Oldboy (2013) [full review]
► Read the full review of Oldboy (2013)
RLR: 5 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 5.2/10
"Spike Lee remaking Park Chan-wook, and the ending was never going to survive."
Spike Lee remade Park Chan-wook’s film with Josh Brolin and the studio cut roughly thirty minutes from Lee’s assembly. He removed his own name from the credits and it is listed as a Spike Lee film instead of a joint. Park’s 2003 film is adapted from a Japanese manga by Garon Tsuchiya.
The corridor sequence is recreated and the comparison is fatal. Park shot his in one continuous take on a single plane, and Lee’s version uses two levels and visible cuts, removing the exhaustion that made the original work. Mark Protosevich wrote the screenplay. Park’s take runs about three minutes and was shot seventeen times in one day.
Brolin is good and Sharlto Copley’s antagonist is a caricature. The original’s villain is quiet, wounded and frightening. This one performs menace constantly, removing the reveal’s power before it arrives. Elizabeth Olsen and Samuel L. Jackson appear alongside Brolin. Choi Min-sik played the original lead and Yoo Ji-tae the antagonist.
The ending softens the original in exactly the way everybody feared. Park’s film ends in an unbearable place and stays there. Lee’s supplies a resolution with an arrangement that makes the horror manageable. It cost around thirty million dollars and took under five. Park’s ending has been argued about continuously since 2003.
17. World War Z (2013) [full review]
► Read the full review of World War Z (2013)
RLR: 5 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 7.0/10
"An oral history adapted by removing the oral history."
Paramount reshot roughly the last forty minutes at a cost of tens of millions after the original third act was abandoned, and Damon Lindelof and Drew Goddard were brought in to write the replacement. The production is more interesting than the film. Brooks published the novel in 2006 and had no involvement in the film.
Max Brooks’s novel is an oral history assembled from interviews across dozens of countries, with no protagonist and a structure built on testimony. The film discards all of it for a single United Nations investigator flying between set pieces. Marc Forster directed and had made Quantum of Solace in 2008.
Paramount abandoned an entire third act set around a battle in Moscow and reshot roughly forty minutes at a cost in the tens of millions, with Damon Lindelof and Drew Goddard brought in to write the replacement. The production became a more widely reported story than the film itself.
The Jerusalem sequence is the one piece that works. A wall, a singing crowd, and a pile-up of bodies climbing itself, and the scale is genuinely impressive because it is the only sequence that keeps the book’s sense of a global event. Matthew Michael Carnahan, Lindelof and Goddard share the screenplay credit.
The replacement third act is a quiet laboratory sequence in Cardiff and it is far better than the abandoned Moscow battle sounded. The film ends small, the one decision the reshoots got right. It took over five hundred and forty million dollars despite the production.
Never Go Back hands Reacher a daughter and deletes the detachment that made him worth reading. Hold the constraint, using the Protagonist Handbook.
18. Rage (2014) [full review]
► Read the full review of Rage (2014)
RLR: 5 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 5.2/10
"Nicolas Cage in a revenge film that changes its own premise late."
Paco Cabezas directed Nicolas Cage as a former criminal whose daughter is abducted, and the film spends ninety minutes on a revenge campaign against the wrong people before revealing the truth. Jim Agnew and Sean Keller wrote the screenplay. Cage has made a large number of these and this is not among the better ones.
The twist is that the daughter’s death was an accident caused by her own friends attempting to conceal a stolen item, and everybody Cage killed across the film was unconnected. It is a genuinely bleak idea in a film with no capacity to carry it.
Cage is doing recognizable work and the film around him is flat. Danny Glover appears as a detective, the Russian material is perfunctory, and the direction has no interest in anything except getting to the next confrontation. Peter Stormare and Max Ryan appear in supporting parts.
19. Jack Reacher: Never Go Back (2016) [full review]
► Read the full review of Jack Reacher: Never Go Back (2016)
RLR: 5 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 6.1/10
"The sequel that removes what made the first one work."
Edward Zwick took over from Christopher McQuarrie and the difference is visible in the first ten minutes. The first film was a procedural with patience. This one is a pursuit with a daughter subplot the novels do not contain. Child published the novel of the same name in 2013 as the eighteenth Reacher book.
Cobie Smulders is good and given very little. Major Turner is competent, capable and written as somebody who mostly needs to be in the same location as Reacher for the plot to function. Danika Yarosh plays the teenager the film invents for the plot. Smulders had come off four seasons of the Marvel films by this point.
The invented daughter is the film’s central error. Reacher has no attachments by design. That is what makes the character work, and giving him a possible child converts him into a conventional action lead with a family to protect. Zwick had directed Cruise once before in The Last Samurai.
20. Now You See Me 2 (2016) [full review]
► Read the full review of Now You See Me 2 (2016)
RLR: 5 / 10
⭐ IMDB: 6.4/10
"Confirms what was wrong with the first one."
Jon M. Chu took over from Louis Leterrier and the sequel compounds the original’s problems. Where the first film cheated once, this one builds its entire plot on revelations that could not have been planned. Lizzy Caplan replaced Isla Fisher, who was pregnant during production.
The card sequence is the best thing in it. The Horsemen passing a playing card between them through a body search, shot in a long take with practical sleight of hand, and it is genuinely delightful. Chu went on to direct Crazy Rich Asians and In the Heights.
Daniel Radcliffe plays the antagonist and is visibly enjoying the chance to be unpleasant, but the character is a plot device with a grievance. Woody Harrelson plays his own twin brother, and the film treats that as a joke and never justifies. The Macau sequences were shot on location over several weeks.
Honorable Mentions: Thrillers Without a Review Here Yet
No review on the site for any of these so far. Each is better than most of what is above and each is on the list.
Duel (1971)
Spielberg’s first feature was made for television in thirteen days, and the driver of the truck is never shown. Richard Matheson wrote it and the antagonist is a vehicle with no stated motive at all.
Cape Fear (1962)
J. Lee Thompson put Robert Mitchum opposite Gregory Peck as a released convict who breaks no laws while destroying a family. The legal helplessness is the whole engine and Mitchum is genuinely frightening.
Breakdown (1997)
Jonathan Mostow stranded Kurt Russell in the desert after his wife accepts a lift and disappears. The antagonists are truckers running an ordinary business and the film is lean enough to run eighty-six minutes.
Frailty (2001)
Bill Paxton directed and starred as a father who believes God has assigned him targets, and the film refuses to confirm whether he is right until the last minute. Matthew McConaughey narrates from a police station.
Enemy of the State (1998)
Tony Scott put Will Smith under total surveillance for two hours and Gene Hackman plays a retired listener living in a Faraday cage. It is effectively a sequel to The Conversation and nobody has ever said so officially.
The Lookout (2007)
Scott Frank gave Joseph Gordon-Levitt a brain-injured man working nights at a bank and being befriended by people who want the keys. The memory notes are used as plot instead of as decoration.
Animal Kingdom (2010)
David Michod dropped a teenager into a Melbourne crime family and let Jacki Weaver play the matriarch as relentlessly affectionate. The threat is always a kiss on the mouth and a suggestion.
Good Time (2017)
The Safdie brothers gave Robert Pattinson one night in Queens getting steadily worse at everything he attempts. The film never slows down and the protagonist ruins every person he encounters along the way.
Uncut Gems (2019)
The Safdies again, with Adam Sandler as a jeweller compounding one bad decision into the next for two hours. The overlapping dialogue and unbroken pressure make it almost physically difficult to sit through.
Kill List (2011)
Ben Wheatley opens on a marriage falling apart, moves into a contract killing procedural, and ends somewhere nobody predicts. The genre shifts twice without ever announcing it.
Calibre (2018)
Matt Palmer put two friends on a Scottish hunting weekend and had them make one irreversible mistake in the first act. The rest is a village closing around them and the ending is unsparing.
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (2011)
Tomas Alfredson compressed le Carre into two hours and trusted the audience completely. Gary Oldman spends the film listening, and the Christmas party flashback carries almost all the emotional content.
Dishonorable Mentions: Thrillers That Failed
Also unreviewed here. Each had a premise worth the budget and lost it somewhere between the pitch and the edit.
Color of Night (1994)
Bruce Willis plays a psychiatrist whose color blindness is presented as a plot mechanism and never functions as one. The killer’s identity requires a deception no member of the group could have sustained.
Jade (1995)
William Friedkin directing a Joe Eszterhas script should have worked, and the film has a genuinely good car chase attached to a mystery that resolves through a confession nobody had reason to make.
Glass (2019)
The conclusion to a trilogy nobody knew was running, resolving three films of build-up in a car park with a broadcast. Sarah Paulson explains the entire premise away and the film agrees with her until it does not.
Twisted (2004)
Ashley Judd plays a detective who blacks out whenever a former lover is murdered, and the film eliminates suspects so efficiently that only one person remains by the halfway mark.
Firewall (2006)
Harrison Ford is a bank security chief forced to rob his own employer, and the film resolves a sophisticated technical premise with a physical fight in a house. The expertise stops mattering entirely.
Blackhat (2015)
Michael Mann shot a cybercrime thriller with his usual precision and gave it a plot in which an enormous international conspiracy turns out to be a commodities trade. The scale and the motive never meet.
What Do You Think?
This is where the ratings drop to 6 and 5, and the entries are here because something in them is worth the time even when the film is not. Tenet and Gattaca will be the arguments. Tell me which one you would move up.
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 Failures