The Worst Comic Book Movies Ever Made

Continuing the list I started yesterday, this post covers the Worst Comic Book Movies Ever Made. Now, for this list, I knew that I hadn't seen all of the movies that truly belonged here, so with help in whittling the field, I called in my good friend Clint, a man with unimpeachable credentials in the fields of comic books and bad movies. In addition to working together on the list, we each selected a "worst movie." Clint's reviews are noted with a special tag, everything else is by me.

10) Catwoman - There are some who would say that no list of terrible comic book movies is complete without this turkey and you know what, we'll have to take their word for it. Neither of us could stomach the task of viewing this reported abomination, so we decided the only fair thing to do was stick it at number ten and cop to going with the herd on this one. Can anyone who's seen it make a convincing case for why it wouldn't belong here?

9) The Punisher (2003) - OK, here's the problem with Punisher. In the old days, the Punisher got attention because he was a straight up killer in a time when comic heroes were still leaving the bad guys tied up outside police HQ with little birdies spinning around their heads. As comics got darker, the Punisher got darker still, and gradually became a celebration of over the top ultra-violence. Here's the problem: movies already have all that. We see it all the time. So, for The Punisher to make the same impact as a movie that it did as a comic, you're going to have to do either absurd Icchi the Killer levels of mayhem, or go for some of that real gets-in-your-brain visceral violence like The Wrestler or American History X. So it's even lamer that they trotted out this limp noodle. This movie reminded me of the generic PI movies they show on late night cable- maybe something starring Brian Bosworth. The whole point of the Punisher is that his need for vengeance has put him totally over the edge. In this movie, he's so over the edge that he commits the following heinous acts: 1) Befriending wacky neighbors. 2) Using cold steaks to scare a criminal into thinking he's going to be tortured. 3) Blowing up villain John Travolta's prized car collection. That seems about right for someone who killed your family, right? [Review by Clint]

8) Hulk - Upon viewing Se7en, producer Arnold Kopelson reportedly told director David Fincher, "You took a perfectly good genre piece and you turned it into a foreign film." That's pretty much what seems to have happened here. One can respect Ang Lee for trying something different with his comic booky transitions, but that doesn't excuse the boring script and the rather silly action scenes.

7) Blade:Trinity - What if they made a Blade movie and Blade was totally insignificant to the story? They'd end up with this horrible misfire. Wesley Snipes seems compeltly bored in his role and writer/director David S. Goyer (you know, co-writer of Batman Begins and The Dark Knight) lets Parker Posey chew the scenery (sorry... the pun was right there) like a vampire that feeds on plaster and plywood. Ryan Reynolds is the only bright spot of this film, which seems more interested in setting up a spin-off than telling a good Blade story.

6) Ghost Rider - An even better argument than the first Hulk movie for why you should not have a CGI protagonist in a live action movie. Over the course of the film, my reaction to the visuals spanned the spectrum between "shitty" and "dumb." The villain is semi-obscure comics also-ran Blackheart, the son of the devil with an inferiority complex about his dad. In the comics, he's got an arguably cool spiny demon sort of thing going on. In the movie, he's the teenage boy from American Beauty, gussied up in eyeliner. So, it basically ends up looking like an extra from DOOM versus the guy from Fallout Boy. [review by Clint]

5) X3: The Last Stand - In a word: gutless. This Brett Ratner-directed travesty kills off two major characters without fanfare in the first half, then moves to a conclusion that indiscriminately kills and depowers most of the remaining interesting characters. The only thing more infuriating than this waste of solid raw material is the fact that the two final scenes hint that all of it can be undone quickly in time for the next sequel. This prompts one to ask, why bother with this shaggy dog story then?

4) The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen - Not just bad, but bad on many levels. As a movie, it's just painfully average. It's a by-the-numbers studio action movie that takes no chances and breaks no new ground. The addition of Tom Sawyer as a fast-talkin' Yankee secret agent reeks of the worst sort of marketing-minded executive meddling. The only thing this movie did right was the inclusion of the immortal Dorian Grey, who was notably absent from the original comics. But what really sets this movie above the rest is the vast quality gap between the source material and the film. With properties like Batman and the X-Men, there's a lot of material out there, all of varying quality, so when you introduce a clunker like X3 into the mix, you're not really diluting the pool too much. But the League had only ever been fantastic. The second volume hadn't even been completed yet when the movie came out. So, when there's only 8 or 9 issues of tight, imaginative comics to use as a point of reference, it makes this totally forgettable effort look extra-bad. Plus, the filmmaking experience was famously so painful for Sean Connery that he's sworn off acting, so it's a double shot in the gut for us geeks. It's worth noting that all these criticisms of League apply equally to another Alan Moore adaptation, From Hell, but somehow that movie failed to gall audiences in quite the same way. [review by Clint]

3) X-Men Origins: Wolverine - So bad that it makes X3 look like X2. Wolverine is one of those characters who's cooler the less we know about him. Though exploring his origins could have been interesting, he deserved better than this poorly-executed one-off that somehow boasts worst visual effects than the first X-Men movie ten years ago, at a mere three times the cost. There are far too many winks at earlier X-Men films in this prequel, and as with X3, the entire enterprise feels pointless by the end. Couldn't we just have gotten a post-X3 spinoff with Wolverine?

2) The Spirit - I said everything I needed to say about this one here.

Clint's #1 ) Captain America: Let's be honest here - the fact that any movie from the 2000's is on a list of the worst superhero movies shows how spoiled we've become. The 80's and 90's were the real golden age of awful superhero movies. Howard the Duck, Swamp-Thing, Dolph Lundgren's Punisher - these are the stuff of shlock legend. And yet, the 1990 production of Captain America manages to stand out even among this bumper crop of turkeys. This crimes this movie perpetrates against film, superheroes, and the American way are literally too many to list.

The origin sequence, where a hero explores the limits of his new-found powers, is a sure-fire hit in any superhero movie. Captain America gets it out of the way quick by getting gut-shot a couple times and spending only ONE day in the hospital. Now that's super! Cap's arch-nemesis, the Nazi mastermind Red Skull has inexplicably become Italian, and sports an accent somewhere between Chico Marx and the "You like-a da juice?" guy from SNL. Cap's slickest move is to fake motion sickness as a pretense for car theft. He does this TWICE.

And we complain about bad CGI? You don't know how good you have it, kids.

At his best, the character of Captain America simultaneously personifies everything that's good about American patriotism, and provides hope that the 90-pound weaklings of the world can aspire to greatness. This movie presents an alternate interpretation, in which he's a time-traveling fuck-up who's seeking redemption for having done absolutely nothing to combat the Nazi menace. See, back in '43, Cap got his ass handed to him as soon as he set foot on foreign soil. Now he's got to stop the bad guys before they... well... I'm sure whatever they're doing it's very bad. It involves a chip in the President's head, but they've already been running the world for 40 years, so who cares?

And that's the real problem with Captain America. Plot points are alternately delivered with the expository grace of a USA Today headline, or not delivered at all. Story details get squeezed together like the movie is playing in fast forward, only to make space for high-stakes bicycle chases in the Italian countryside. The movie becomes a parody of itself. In fact, I'm sure some enterprising grad student could make the case for Captain America as a post-modern deconstruction of the entire superhero concept. Sadly, the movie is not nearly that creative, and even if it were, it would still be extremely boring.

[Bitter Script Reader's Note: Captain America was never released to theatres, but is heavily bootlegged and notorious in comic circles. Including it on this list might skirt the criteria we used to compile this list, but I can't reject a review this excellent. The Roger Corman Fantastic Four was also very close to making this list, but in the end it was decided there was space for only one unreleased film. Fair? Probably not, but it's our list.]

[Update: as L.F. pointed out in the comments, you can see Captain America on Hulu by clicking this link.]

Bitter Script Reader's #1) Batman & Robin - I resisted putting this in the top spot because it's almost like shooting fish in a barrel to make fun of this Joel Schumacher disaster. It's so campy that it's practically a tribute to the 1960s Adam West series. Arnold Schwarzenegger and Uma Thurman camp it up beyond belief as Mr. Freeze and Poison Ivy, while Alicia Silverstone and Chris O'Donnell given little to do beyond squeeze into their outfits. In his better moments George Clooney makes one wonder what he might have been able to do as Bruce Wayne if given a more serious script, but there's little here worth watching. The highlight of the Batman DVD boxed set was seeing Joel Schumacher sincerely apologize for this.

Now, I also promised Clint the opportunity to do a Minority Report #1 on my "Best Comic Book Movies" list, which I'm printing below:

MINORITY REPORT - Akira: If you ask people of a certain age if they've ever watched anime, a lot of them are going to say, "No, but I saw Akira." We had stuff like Speed Racer and Starblazers kicking around in America for decades, but Akira's stateside release is when we figured out that something different was going on across the Pacific. The setting is immediately interesting, the characters immediately memorable. The pace is deliberate and creepy, when it's not balls-out insane. The plot, involving a buried government experiment to weaponize the brains of children, provides fuel for some of the most imaginative action sequences ever drawn. The story seems to break down at the end, as director and original manga author Katsuhiro Otomo scrambles to pack six thick volumes worth of pseudo-metaphysical musing into 5 minutes of screen time, but I'd argue that collapse makes the movie all the more suitable for repeat viewings.

Lessons from bad movies - "The Spirit"

This weekend I Netflixed a film I knew better than to spend $12 on when it was in wide release - Frank Miller's The Spirit. I'd seen the presentation for this film at last year's Comic Con, where one previewed scene played so horribly to the audience that the producer was practically apologizing for it after running the clip. I knew I shouldn't spend theatre prices on this turkey, but it immediately earned a place in my Netflix queue.

Most of the major critics took their shots at this one back when it first came out, so I'm not going to waste time with a broad review. Also, I've never really followed the Will Eisner comic upon which this is based, so I can't speak too deeply to the film's fidelity to the source material. Still even with the limited exposure I've had to the comics, I can tell that visually, the film looks nothing like Eisner's vision. It looks more like... well... Sin City, which Miller co-directed with Robert Rodriguez.

In comparing the two, you can get a sense of where Miller went wrong here. For all of its demerits - and there are many - The Spirit is a very visually strong film. There are the usual Miller motifs, and he certainly knows how to compose a shot. (Not surprising since Miller's been working in the visual medium of comic books for about thirty years.) This is one of the best-looking bad movies I've seen. I know a lot of people derided the style as a Sin City rip-off, but Miller really is just ripping off himself - and a few Eisner visuals shown in the DVD supplements suggest that Eisner worked in a similar style on some of his later projects.

What's wrong in The Spirit? Just about everything else - starting with the script. I'll give a brief mea culpa here. Back in the summer of '04, a development exec I read for got a copy of the Sin City script and allowed me to read it. At the time I hadn't read the comics, but I was well aware of the creator's reputation. I peeled back the cover page, eager to see how the story had been adapted.

I got about ten pages in before I tossed the script aside and wrote it off as a dud. It felt like the vast majority of those ten pages were made up of over-written visual description and especially over-written voiceover narration. I figured there was no way it would work. About ten months later, when the film came out, I had a healthy serving of crow. The two directors made the narration work - incorporating it in a way that really complimented the noir style they were emulating.

Given that, I can understand why no one immediately cried foul when The Spirit proved to have an equally prolific inner monologue. The problem: his inner monologue isn't always inner. There are scenes that start with The Spirit's narration, only to then shift to him talking to himself out loud. This was one of the early slips that pulled me out of the film. Narration might be intrusive, but if you can get the audience to accept it as a part of the style, don't change horses in mid-stream. There seems to be no rhyme or reason as to why The Spirit voices some thoughts out loud and ruminates internally in others. Given a choice between the two, I'd argue it's less intrusive to go with voiceover. That way there isn't the strangeness of a character talking just so the audience can hear him.

The script also suffers from a plot so dull it's not even worth recounting. There's a fairly mundane set-up early on that ends up pitting two antagonists against each other, with The Spirit conflicted because one antagonist is his former love and the other has a hidden connection to his own immortality. This is one of those movies where the characters end up stopping frequently to explain the plot and motivations to each other - and here's where Miller exposes his limitations as a writer and director. Exposition scenes are overwritten, some set-ups are awkwardly paced only so the story can advance, and the blocking in these talky scenes is often reminiscent of a bad high school play.

Which brings us to the element that truly brings this film down - the acting. I'd argue that only two actors escape this debacle unscathed - Dan Lauria and Samuel L. Jackson. Lauria does the impossible - he somehow finds the exact right note between camp and serious in the cliched role of the hard-boiled police commissioner. It's over the top in all the right ways, even as virtually every other actor stumbles badly when Miller directs them to be broad. Jackson escapes only by virtue of being Jackson.

Again I draw a comparison to Sin City, where Miller and Rodriguez had the advantage of having strong actors like Mickey Rourke, Benicio del Toro, and Bruce Willis in their corner. However, for me, the real shock was how they got solid performances out of actors who generally aren't that good. Jessica Alba might be considered one of the sexiest women alive, but her acting has never been all that impressive - yet amazingly, she turned in a surprisingly vulnerable and likable performance. Brittany Murphy is one of the most annoying actresses alive, so bad that she'll make your eyes and ears bleed - and somehow she totally blended into Sin City's style. Even Rosario Dawson stood out, despite having given few notable performances prior to that. At least one of the directors knew how to get through to these often-uneven players... and from The Spirit, I think it's safe to say that was Rodriguez.

Scarlett Johansson, Eva Mendes, Paz Vega and especially Stana Katic all give performances so bad that they would be career-ending if it wasn't for their sex appeal and the fact it's clear that all of this is Miller's fault. I don't know if there are enough adjectives to adequately convey just how terrible their acting is. The amazing thing is you can completely see what they're going for, even as it's obvious just how badly they missed the target.

Let this be a lesson to all writers - great actors can sometimes save even your weak material. The right material can even elevate your actors... but when an actor tanks a performance that's all the audience will see. Few people watch an awkward scene and think, "Wow that was well-written, the actor just blew it." More likely, they'll think "This movie sucks, this actor sucks," or "this script sucks." Like I said earlier, the script certainly didn't do the actors any favors here, but the dialogue was stylized enough that the right actors might have been able to minimize the damage - had they found the right note in their performances. That's the risk you take when you write highly-stylized dialogue.

Granted, the film suffers from further problems, where logic seems to take a total vacation. My favorite example of this comes with the Spirit is captured by the Octopus. Our hero wakes up in a room decorated with Nazi motifs, and his captors are soon revealed in Nazi uniforms - except for his torturer - a woman dressed as an Arabian belly dancer, though she turns out to be a French woman named "Plaster of Paris." Then, just as you're trying to make sense of this odd cultural melting pot, it dawns on you that this "French" woman is played by Spanish actress Paz Vega.

Blame the visuals all you want for that one, but every one of those odd choices was probably made at the script level - save for the casting of Paz Vega. And even if it wasn't, Miller wrote and directed the film, meaning that all of this HAD to be his vision. It plays like a weird exercise in multiculturalism.

I can't offer any one macro lesson from this turkey, but there are plenty of little lessons to be gleaned. Some problems might be visible at the script level, and others might not become evident until actors actually say their lines out loud.

To recap:
1) Don't switch between narration and having a character talk to himself. If you're gonna go for the narration cheat, embrace it whole-hog.

2) Don't overcomplicate the plot solely through dialogue.

3) Keep exposition efficient. In the cases where you can't, don't just have the characters pace back-and-forth. Give them something visually interesting to do.

4) With the right direction, even bad actors can find the proper tone for your stylized story. Make sure the script isn't so stylized that it strands them with one-note characters.

5) Make sure there's a logic to the set design and wardrobe you specify. If your villain wears a Nazi uniform for kicks, make sure we know what that's supposed to say about his character - especially when there's no consistency between that and the rest of his wardrobe.

I'll conclude with this - it feels like several decisions could have been made at the script stage that would have minimized the damage in the execution... but then we would have had merely a boring film instead of an awesomely bad one.