When good casts go bad - movies that shoulda worked

I’d say Evolution. The only way to explain that movie was that they were TRYING to be bad. Hell, even the basic premise had tons of potential! TONS!

Although far from a trainwreck, Glengarry Glen Ross (Lemmon, Pacino, Spacey, Ed Harris, Alec Baldwin, Arkin, John Pryce) did nothing for me aside from the incredible acting, including Lemmon in his finest performance (IMO) and Baldwin in his ONLY good one…

Dustin Hoffman , Sharon Stone , Samuel L. Jackson , Peter Coyote , Liev Schreiber , Queen Latifah , Marga Gomez , Huey Lewis

Directed by Barry Levinson
Screenwriter Paul Attanasio

Absolutely awful!
I liked Mystery Men, too.

Ha. I went to see this in the theater with two friends, and they were far more taken with it than I was. They asked me " what’s your favorite part?" So I told them the truth " The costumes." They weren’t pleased :stuck_out_tongue:

I disliked Mystery Men, but I do like Evolution. Evolution is campy, it’s not supposed to be a deep movie.

That’s about the same thing I said, except I was with my sisters, who were also familiar with the book, so they understood. :wink:

“Heavy” (1995)

Liv Tyler, Shelley Winters and Deborah Harry. You’d think it would work, but frankly I would rather spend my time sticking tacks in the roof of my mouth then watch that movie again.

I cant imagine any film with Liv Tyler being good. LOTR scraped through!

Dustin Hoffman
Dustin Hoffman
Dustin Hoffman
Dustin Hoffman
Dustin Hoffman
Dustin Hoffman
Dustin Hoffman
Dustin Hoffman

Man, that guy has made some poor choices in the past 15 years. He hasn’t put in a good performance since Rain Man, and for being a supposedly Grade ‘A’ actor he’s wasted a lot of film stock. In all the titles above, there are quite a lot of other good actors.

I was going to say this!

Kevin Kline, Will Smith, and Kenneth Branagh along with a giant mechanical spider and a bunch of silent supermodels in skimpy outfits! What more could it need.

But it was just a mean-spirited, unfun little movie. Ugh.

Okay, I’ll be the killjoy and say what a huge disappointment Mystery Men was. Sure, it wasn’t execrable, but with that cast and that premise, they could have made the ultimate superhero spoof; instead, it was an amiable, bland little movie.

I blame the writers.

Daniel

Keanu Reeves gawking his way through Dracula as Jonathan Harker made me truly question Coppolla’s connection to planet Earth.

(Speaking of Kenneth Branagh) Kenneth Branah, Robert deNiro, Helena Bonham Carter, Aidan Quinn, John Cleese…

However did Branagh muck things up so badly to end up with the steaming pile of mierda that was Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. The fake-o buttered popcorn was far more entertaining than the movie.

You shut your dirty mouth. I liked this movie a lot! :slight_smile:

I could be mean, and list all of the Spielberg movies that are total crap, but I’ll stick with the basics: 1941.

What a waste of talent! Belushi, Ackroyd, Candy, Lee, Pickens, Stack, etc., etc.

Too bad the script stunk and the director was an idiot.

I have to agree with this assessment. Hoffman in Outbreak appeared to be still in Rainman mode. He has probably disappointed me more than any other actor.

I’m going to submit The Avengers. Ralph Fiennes, Uma Thurman and Sir Sean Connery? Surely this movie could do no wrong, though I. Boy was I ever wrong.

And for the record I loved Death to Smoochy. I started an appreciation thread a few months back and it sank faster than a stone tied to a boulder. I thought Mystery Men was great. In fact, I think I need to own it. Finally, Evolution was supposed to campy, as another poster mentioned. It was pretty funny to me.

Steve McQueen
Paul Newman
William Holden
Faye Dunaway
Fred Astaire
Susan Blakely
Richard Chamberlain

The Towering Inferno

I’m just gonna put a vote in for the ‘Mystery Men r00ls’ camp. So we’re in the majority, right? That has to mean it’s true, right?

Since I’ve started watching the majority of movies not in the theatre but by renting, I find my tolerance for bad movies increasing. If I don’t like it, I can just skip ahead to the good parts. If there aren’t any, I can watch the pretty babes without the sound. If there are not pretty babes, then why the heck would I rent it. :wink:

In other words, if the pictures are pretty, I’m fairly easily satisfied. With books however my standards are higher.

Hold thy impudent tongue, woman. :cool: That movie was brilliant! Mondo-high gothic that goes screaming to the brink of camp before juuust stepping back from it.

No, no, no. though I could have done without the Paul Ruebens character, the real reason for the failure of Mystery Men is not in the writing, it had a very funny script, the problem was solely the director, Kinka Usher and his decision to have all the dialogue *between * characters spoken directly to the camera, rather than doing two-fers or over the shoulder takes. It seems like a little thing, but it’s a seriously annoying film grammar screw-up.