Movies that failed to live up to their potential

Every year it seems that there are movies that are produced, basically, to win Oscars. And then they fall flat.

A non-comprehensive list of the kind of movies I'm talking about:

"J. Edgar"
"A Dangerous Method"
"Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close"
"The Iron Lady"
"Revolutionary Road"

 

Killing Them Softly

Based on a good book (Cogan's Game) and a very good cast. Awful, awful movie.

 

Burn After Reading

 

See, I enjoyed that movie. I also liked The Ladykillers. I'm a sucker for all things Coen, I guess.

 

I was really excited to see Mystery Men when it came out, but I thought the premise was going to be more that these people thought they were super heroes in a realistic world where there are no real super heroes. I think there would have been a lot more comedy to mine from that.

Kickass was a similar idea done much better.


Can we throw TV shows into the conversation, because Entourage fits the bill for me. It always started toward a compelling story line, then took the most shallow route to an easy resolution possible.

 

Kind of hard to top the brilliance of Godfather II, so a letdown was inevitable.

 

The Road.

Great director (John Hillcoat who had previously done the great movie The Proposition), great cast, great source material.

All just came together was very blah. Maybe it was hard to translate the intensity of the book to the screen.

Regarding Road to Perdition: I loved it. I think it's one of the most beautiful shot movies I've ever seen. The bathroom scene is still one of my all-time favorite shots.

 

Babel and Contagion

I wanted very much to like them. in both cases, I walked out thinking, "Was I supposed to care about how that ended?"

 

Agreed. Saw the movie on a flight recently and when the credits started rolling, I thought that the movie had barely started. The whole politics/fiscal crises voiceovers were just stupid.

 

No Country For Old Men

Superbad

Love, Actually

 

Really enjoyed the movie. Hanks maybe wasn't menacing enough, but I thought it didn't get the respect it deserved.

 

This. I loved the trailer and looked forward to the fun that looked like was this movie as much as any over the past five or six years, and thought it sucked. I'm not let down with movies often, but was there.

My wife was so looking forward to Titanic and then thought it blew balls so hard that even to this day still nearly goes into a fit of rage when anything from that movie is referenced.