We’ve been living in the age of the reboot, but 2016 may go down as the year the tides turned against this bothersome trend among movie studios. This year, and in particular this summer, saw so many cash-in sequels and reboots of old properties that didn’t need rebooting underperform, in terms of both critical reception and box office, that many publications began proclaiming this “the year movies stopped mattering.”
Though that sort of doom-saying is a little extreme, this year was littered with lousy Hollywood franchise entries, all of which seemed especially disappointing after 2015 releases like Creed and Mad Max: Fury Road proved that reboots could be so much more than empty cash-ins. Let’s celebrate the end of this unfortunate year in Hollywood history by going through the worst reboots released in 2016.
Zoolander 2
The first Zoolander is a brilliantly stupid movie. Its long-delayed sequel is just plain stupid. Coming 15 years after the original, Zoolander 2 flounders like so many other comedy sequels while trying to recreate the magic of the first film, which blended celebrity commentary, sight gags and cheesy celebrity cameos into an oddly quotable and enduring comedy.
Star and director Ben Stiller doubled down on the celebrity cameos seemingly to distract from his lack of a new story to tell. A few jokes about hipster insincerity and the modern fascination with “farm-to-table” food work, but they’re stranded in a sequel that is largely unfunny and (like Dumb and Dumber To) off-putting in its mean-spiritedness.
Independence Day: Resurgence
As with Zoolander, the original Independence Day was just the right sort of dumb to make for a fun, quintessentially late ‘90s blockbuster. The 2016 reboot is also a clear product of its time, only in all the worst ways — from its bloated runtime and weightless CGI space battles to its reliance utter lack of character development or coherent plotting.
It’s a disorienting movie that thinks ungrounded, often confusing spectacle can make for its utter lack of emotional interest or good dialogue. Thankfully, critics and audiences alike saw through this mishmash of troubling Hollywood trends, ensuring the implied sequel will never come to pass even if the movie did still earn almost $400 million worldwide — still a big disappointment compared to the original projections.
The Rocky Horror Picture Show: Let’s Do the Time Warp Again
Rather than try to convincingly emulate the bizarre B-movie eroticism of the midnight cult classic on which it’s based, this straight-to-TV remake sanitizes away all the weirdness and sexuality of the 1975 original to better appeal to preteen girls.
Despite the best efforts of Laverne Cox to match Tim Curry’s energy as the flamboyant Dr. Frank-N-Furter, every wooden performance and sub-Kidz Bop-level song simply pales in comparison to the original version. Let’s Do the Time Warp Again offers no reason for its existence, and in a year full of unnecessary remakes, stands out as likely the most unnecessary of all.
Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice
The atrociously titled Batman v. Superman is a Batman reboot, just as it’s also a sequel, a crossover, a comic book adaptation and the start to a new cinematic universe. Warner Bros. had so much riding on this Justice League-prelude they seemed to shove in anything they could, regardless of if it made sense in the context of the story — including multiple dream sequences, Wonder Woman, a visit from future-Flash and two additional villains beyond the titular warring titans.
Even ignoring the padding designed to boost the studio’s future releases, Batman v. Superman is still a failure due to its jumbled plotting, disorienting action and director Zack Snyder’s fundamental misunderstanding of what Superman is supposed to be.
Blair Witch
Despite the involvement of capable horror director Adam Wingard, Blair Witch never really had much hope of recapturing the specific brand of relatable handheld horror that made 1999’s no-budget The Blair Witch Project such a surprise hit.
This sequel retains essentially the same plot of the original, only replacing the frightening authenticity with more characters, more cameras and more noisy action. Though not terrible, it’s a disappointingly standard horror sequel that pales in comparison to both its source material and its director’s other work.
Ben-Hur
It might not be the year movies stopped mattering, but hopefully 2016 is the year Hollywood stopped making lousy sword-and-sandals epics no one really wants. Unlike this year’s other Gladiator-esque flop Gods of Egypt, Ben-Hur has the misfortune of being named for a classic of old Hollywood to which it can’t hope to compare.
Not only was this miscalculated release lacking in star-power and a marketing push, it was lacking in content too, offering a flimsy story with flimsy ideas and bland characters fighting flimsy CGI battles.
Want to see more lists? Check out our Everybody Loves a List! page.
from Myspace - Editorial http://ift.tt/2hVSEMu
No comments:
Post a Comment