Movies that started off good then fell on their butt

Cafe Society
1

Yes, they’re out there folks. Movies that start off great, cool concepts, well written, more than halfway-decent acting, the, somewhere around the middle of the film… something… happens and the movie ceases to be good.

At just this moment, two films come to mind.

Enemy Mine, which had Lou Gosset Jr. in it, which is always a good, as a lizard guy from a species that is at war with Earth. The Earth guy (can’t remember who played him) and LG Gr. end up crash-landed on some Godforsaken rock of a planet and are dependent on each other for survival. So far, so good. Except that the Lizard Guy Species is hermaphroditic and self-fertilizing. So, LG Jr. becomes pregnant and subsequently dies in childbirth. Suddenly a really cool movie about two mortal enemies thrown in together, forced to learn to trust each other, then becoming friends turns into a sappy melodrama about a guy having to raise a lizard baby on his own, oh, yeah, and there are people who want to kill him and the lizard baby. Can’t remember too much of the details behind that, it’s been too many years since I’ve seen the film, but the second half of the movie was torture to watch.

They Live. Pro wrestler Rowdy Roddy Piper made a few movies, and turned out to be a surprisingly good actor. In They Live, he plays a guy who finds a pair of sunglasses which, when worn, enable the wearer to, well, see things as they really are. Subliminal messages everywhere, on everything, including billboards and, not surprisingly, money. Oh, and the power brokers of the world are lizard-like aliens who are out to control us. Anyway, the movie starts off really well, as one guy discovers the Conspiracy, nobody believes him, actually standard fare, but quite well-done. Then about the middle of the film, we have a break for some pro wrestling (yep, another pro wrestler enters the film, also a pretty decent actor, can’t remember who he was). Basically, an old friend with whom Piper’s character has had a falling out comes on the scene, Piper tries to recruit him to help, a fight ensues… and goes on, and on, and on. I mean, OK, yeah, pro wrestling is kinda fun to watch, and it was kinda cool seeing them bust some moves, but it just got totally ridiculous. Anyhoo, Piper pins his opponent and sticks the sunglasses on his face, and after that the two team up to fight the Con. Except that the movie completely lost momentum after the pro wrestling scene, and just sort of dragged on toward the ending.

So what other films started off really cool and collapsed onto their kiesters about halfway through?

2

How about Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom?

If you were to graph my enjoyment level over the course of this movie, it would look just like the side of that cliff with the rope bridge towards the end of it. Paramount logo! Huge gong! Hot woman in big dance number singing “Anything Goes!” Indiana Jones is back, looking hot! Spies! Poison! Big action fight scene in a night club with a vial of antidote! Daring escape by plane! Intrigue! And then that movie ended suddenly and turned into… whatever the rest of the dang thing was.

Watching it felt like Stephen Spielberg and George Lucas had ripped out my heart, set it on fire, and threw it into a volcano.

3

Evolution. The first tenth of the movie is pretty entertaining, and sets up a LOT of potential for some REALLY ridiculous, ludicrous laughs. It had a wonderfully stupid, unrealistic kickoff, with uber-evolving microbes, that we coulda been given an Airplane!-level guffaws.

Unfortunately, the movie tried to take itself seriously.

I mean, this isn’t just falling on your butt, this is shooting yourself in the balls-level bad.

4

Alien Resurrection. No seriously don’t laugh. I enjoyed the first half of the movie; good storyline, interesting characters, some vague element of doubt about Ripley’s past (which they really should have kept in greater suspense), some good horror elements in the ‘reject Ripleys’. The aliens get lose, the spaceship is heading for Earth.

And then they fall through a hole in the floor into a giant fungus alien thingy that gives birth or some shit and then it still manages to make progressively less sense and turns into some huge maternal instinct/feminism allegory. Blech.

I really had high hopes that this movie might just save the series, and then the last 1/3 of the movie was shite.

I might also add “Daredevil, although it didn’t so much trail off as totally failed to have any real ending at all. It’s like they compressed the last hour of the movie into 15 minutes.

5

Timecop has one of the coolest opening scenes I have ever seen. The potential in that one little setpiece for the movie to rock is tremendous!

But instead the rest of the film is complete shit.

6

Bzzt, wrong. The movie went to ABSOLUTE shit when they killed off the coolest character FIRST.

7

Joe vs. the Volcano has a great opening sequence… just wonderful.
It continues from there, it’s a wonderful movie, full of great character sketches, good acting, nice symbolism, wonderful visuals, good dialogue, (a kind of weird plot - but that’s ok).

And then, they land on the island. And it just sucks until the movie ends.

8

Independence Day was entertaining until the part where they killed Data. Actually it started turning sour before that, but that was the last straw. The rest of the movie just doesn’t make sense - Jeff Goldblum programs a supervirus in less than 24 hours for an alien OS while having a hangover in order to temporarily knock out the shields of the invasion ships, but instead of waiting for their shields to come online again all of the 50 ships or so open up their most vulnerable part so that presidents in jet planes all over the world can shoot them down.

Ok, great stuff for a parody, but not for a sci-fi movie. After I left the cinema, I thought it was a waste of good time and money.

9

I can’t even remeber who dies first in ressurection. Wasn’t it the mad scientist?

10

It wasn’t a patch on the short story on which it was based, although the predominant theme in the story is in fact the whole idea of mortal enemies becoming friends, then Davidge, through the process of raising the alien infant, ultimately having more in common with Dracs than Humans - in essence, it is a story about racism and intolerance

11

Event Horizon was great for maybe the first half of the film. Scary stuff going on, people hallucinating - and then it seems like someone stepped in and rewrote the script based on Hellraiser, put Sam Neill in some ugly makeup, and it went down the toilet. My husband has a pretty low level of expectations for SF/horror films, but even he at the end was going “wtf? That sucked!”

12

Similar to Independence Day was Saving Private Ryan. Without the first half hour, it’s an irretrievably ignorant and patronising pile of crap, with bits of cliche Hollywood sentementality thrown in. Yet people somehow didn’t notice.

13

Octopussy. After John Glen directed the wonderful, restored-the-60s-Bond For Your Eyes Only, I’d hoped for the same from his next entry. Despite the hokeyness of the opening sequence (although the mini-jet was cool), it held my interest, and after the titles you could see them using parts of the story “Property of a Lady” (included in the collection containing the titular “Octopussy”), so they were evidently going the same route as in FYEO. Good buildup. Conservative hawk Russian general. Good possibilities.
Then it reverted to 1970s Moore Bond silliness. Moore treating a tiger like a trained dog. A Crocodile scuba outfit. An island of combat women. Q in a balloon, for cryin’ out loud.

The next movie was worse (despite some good moments), but the Bond films didn’t get back to being good again until The Living Daylights

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I agree. Event Horizon had a lot of wasted potential. The environments of the movie are top notch. Being stuck out in deep space with crazy horror stuff going on with nobody to save you. That in and of itself scared me. Too bad that in most other ways it was crappy.

15

It seemed like a rip-off of The Shining sort of, but with a ship in space. Wasn’t there a sequence where blood spilled out of a container?

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Minority Report This was a great movie until they did the totally cliche stuff where the bad guy gets his comeuppance at his banquet and then he faced of with Tom Cruise. Guns goes off. Who got shot? Ahhhh. It was the bad guy.

Recently. . .

Garden State Started off quirky and funny and irreverant and then plowed into a shit heap of psycho babble and sappy overused crap writing about feelings that were essentially illogical in terms of what we already saw.

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You must be talking about Alien 3 :slight_smile:

18

Full Metal Jacket.

What do I win?

19

The Beach started off well enough and the middle part was great. This had potential to be a decent little thriller, but when Leo goes all ‘Super Mario Apocalypse Now’, I just lost it and the movie never recovered.

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My Big Fat Greek Wedding – first half great, last half–pretty bad. I don’t remember the details about why.