Yes. I hated it.
I guessed the twist two minutes in, and then saw all the tortuous plot dynamics they had to force to make it work. It felt like it was written by a 14 year old for English class. And I say that because I wrote a story kind of sort of similar at that age too.
Disliked Themes:
Amnesia Plots – Trite, cliché, generally without cred.
Cinema of the Victim – The cast exists to be killed off one-by-one.
Glamorized Vigilantes - Denying due process to people is not a cause for admiration or sympathy.
The Glamorization of Stupidity – Stupid characters are de rigueur. I don’t have a problem with that as long as those characters – and anyone else who willingly hangs out with them – suffers for their stupidity. The absence of such suffering, imo, glamorizes stupidity by making it appealing/funny.
It was all a dream cop-out movies – Overdone, tiresome, lazy.
Disliked Motifs:
Characters who continue to function despite being shot/stabbed repeatedly (absent any supernatural/sci-fi/zombie explanation).
Too many misses with automatic weapons at close range.
Characters who have no firearms training or experience being able to successfully pick off bad guys.
Characters who willingly hang out with incompetent assistants who ruin their plans repeatedly (e.g., why does Cap’n Hook keep Mr. Smee on his payroll?)
Liked Themes:
Giant monsters destroying shit – This includes (virtually) all kaiju and dinosaur movies, but excludes insects (with the notable exception of Mothra).
Movies set (largely) in jungles - Kongo (1932), Tarzan and his Mate (1934), Strange Cargo (1940), Death in the Garden (1956).
Truck Movies – I have no idea why they appeal to me, but after enjoying several, I cannot deny it is so; e.g., Wages of Fear/Sorcerer (1953/1977), Hell Drivers (1957), The Long Haul (1957), The Big Gamble (1961). NOTE: Notwithstanding Brian Keith’s hilariously macho performance, I did not enjoy Violent Road (1958) owing to a plot set-up which undercut all the suspense.
I don’t like dream sequences at all. They’re always stupid.
Favorite: I do like a good heist, detective, or prison break movie. I think someone here once referred to a genre as “getting shit to work” movies, where the central conflict facing the characters is something mechanical or technical, like breaking into a bank vault or out of a cell.
Least favorite: I dislike romantic movies where the couple show every sign of hating each other, bickering right up to the moment where they realize they’re in love.
Kung fu, shovel fu, chainsaw fu. Joe Bob says check it out.
I’m a bit over the “climbing a tower/outside the submarine/down a cliff to reach the big red button” finale.
Another one to try is the Spanish movie Timecrimes.
It’s one of the few movies I watched a second time, not because stuff wasn’t explained properly first time round, but because I wanted to convince myself that all the temporal stuff was entirely self-consistent and it is.
------------------------------------------
Least favorite for me is the John Wick, Equalizer, Nobody style of super assassin movie.
Even if I can appreciate the great choreography, it just irks me whenever the hero acts as though he knows he’s indestructible. Completely takes me out of the movie.
Like, I can buy that someone is a super-duper ultra killer. But I don’t buy that a human will walk into a room full of mooks, acting as though he knows he cannot be trivially shot in the back of the head, or find himself in an undodgeable cloud of machine gun bullets.
Also, violence porn. I think the Saw franchise had some interesting ideas but was ruined by buying into the idea that gratuitous violence was the “secret sauce”. I can recommend the movie Escape Room as essentially the same thing but without all the skin-peeling silliness.
Likewise Once upon a time in Hollywood was spoiled for me by the violence. There’s no way I can find that level of gross out stuff funny or cathartic.
I haven’t. Are you recommending it because it’s good or offering it up as an example of truly bad? I’ve got it queued up and just want to know what to expect.
I did, but don’t really remember it.
Noted. Thanks!
But what if you would combine hated and favorite movie themes? Groundhog Day of the Dead? It’s Edge of Tomorrow meets Zombieland
I absolutely hate and will not watch rom-coms.
Although I enjoy sci-fi, I do not like fantasy.
I like a good murder mystery, but only if they avoid the trite themes like guy found dead in a locked room.
Hate movies where the underdog sports team wins the game, and virtually always by coming from behind at the last second. At least Rocky had the sense to have the hero lose at the end.
Hate it when two people who dislike each other and thrown together, and if they’re of opposite genders you know they’re going to fall in love.
Ah, the mammeries memories.
I tried to watch that movie and I got VERY confused. However, a good friend (whose opinion I respect) absolutely loved it. I’ll have to give it another try.
These days they don’t even have to be of opposite genders. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
But I am also bothered by the inevitability of the romantic connection whether the story seems to call for it or not.
The best sports movies are when the result of the Big Game goes against the grain of the movie. Rocky loses the fight, and The Bad News Bears lose their championship game, and they are all triumphant. Fast Eddie beats Minnesota Fats at the end of The Hustler, and it’s still a tragedy.
There’s also the underrated Mystery, Alaska.
Agree wholeheartedly.
“True story” movies that egregiously play fast and loose with the actual facts. About the only thing the fictional William Wallace in ‘Braveheart’ had in common with the real WW was the name.
What, no ‘Duel’? ( 1971 )
‘They Drive by Night’ ( 1940 ) is worth a look. Seems to show up reasonably often on TCM.
I’ve seen most of Duel (including the end), but did not care for it enough to watch the whole thing.
I haven’t seen They Drive by Night (1940) in quite a long while. I do not have fond memories of it – a common phenomenon I experience whenever it comes to movies starring (or co-starring) George Raft – though I do recall some amusing overacting by Ida Lupino.
I have also seen They Drive by Night (1938), a Brit truck movie which I did not enjoy apart from Ernest Thesiger’s usual creepy performance. It introduced me to the concept of “lorry girls.”
Did not like Thieves’ Highway (1949) or Convoy (1978), either. It seems the only truck movies I like were made in the ‘50s or early ‘60s, or (like Sorcerer) derived from one of them. Very strange….
I’ll go with some of the others mentioned. I strongly dislike the “it was all a dream” nonsense. I don’t like stories that start at the end.
One that hasn’t been mentioned is clones. Not clone armies like in the Star Wars prequels, but cloning used as a way to bring the villain back to life for a second, third, or more go round as the baddy. That was one of the problems I had with Star Wars IX. The Dune sequel books also rely on this to a large extent, and it’s even more annoying there.
I don’t mind the violence, but the Saw sequels, again IIRC, all had the flaw of being predictable. The villain of the upcoming sequel (not just the current sequel, all of them after the death of John Kramer) is someone who survived a prior film, usually the one immediately preceding it.
I don’t mind violence either, I’m not squeamish. The first Saw was pretty violent but it served the plot. Game of Thrones was hella violent, but it was showing the reality of life in that quasi-medieval world.
The later Saw films did just become torture porn, with increasing shots of bones broken and skin flaying that I guess are supposed to be entertaining in some way in themselves, but just aren’t to me.
You can’t just post that! What theme is that an example of (the previous posts were all about underdog sports movies? Is it that?)
And is it a “hated” or a “most favorite” theme?