2007's Bottom Five Film's- Dave

Best Movie That Was Bad, But Had The Potential To Be Good:

The Kingdom – All-star cast? Check. Decent writer? More or less a check. Good story? Surprisingly, yes. Good director? Check.

So what the hell happened?

Honestly, I do not know. My best guess is that I think the director, Peter Berg, chooses to showcase the action pieces more than the heart that lies with Carnahan’s script. Even though the action pieces are quite good, it almost becomes too much in a film that could have had as much soul as the best action movie of the year, The Bourne Ultimatum.

5. Spider-Man 3 – Three is a crowd. The latest (‘Cause there is more to come) installment in the web-crawler’s trilogy falls short of the previous two. While it may not be a horrible movie, it is certainly a disappointment.


4. Next – “Las Vegas showroom magician Cris Johnson has a secret which torments him: he can see a few minutes into the future. Sick of the examinations he underwent as a child and the interest of the government and medical establishment in his power, he lies low under an assumed name in Vegas, performing cheap tricks and living off small-time gambling "winnings." But when a terrorist group threatens to detonate a nuclear device in Los Angeles, government agent Callie Ferris must use all her wiles to capture Cris and convince him to help her stop the cataclysm.”

That is the plot synopsis from IMDB.com. The scary part is that this is not the most ridiculous thing in the movie. Julianne Moore plays a tough FBI agent, but the cream of the crop is Nicolas Cage’s hairpiece.

3. Shrek the Third – I kind of knew what to expect going into this movie, but it was still bad. The joy that was in the previous two is just not there anymore and they plan on making two more films. Ugh.

2. Rush Hour 3 – I did not see this film, yet the awfulness is so palpable I had to put it number two.

Actually, I put it here because this movie raises more questions than answers.
Consider the following:

• Why was there a six year gap between Rush Hour 2 and Rush Hour 3? It is not like Chris Tucker wasn’t available.
• Did Rush Hour 2 leave that many questions unanswered?
• What does $50 million + $53.25 million + $7 million equal? You could say $110.25 million, and you would be correct. How about the paydays for Tucker, Chan, and Ratner? That would be correct too. How does this happen?
• Tucker’s character is from California, Chan’s is from China, yet the movie is set in France. What?
• You can clearly see the ridiculousness of this all

1. Lions for Lambs – I figured this would actually be a good movie, if not a great one. I looked and saw that Robert Redford was directing and producing the film, which has yielded such results as Ordinary People and A River Runs Through It. I saw Matthew Michael Carnahan, who is an up and coming writer and brother to Joe Carnahan of Narc fame. I saw Tom Cruise, who I admire and has previously worked with Joe Carnahan on Narc for great results. I saw Academy Award winner Meryl Streep, and rising stars Derek Luke and Michael Pena. I figured this was the first movie coming out of the United Artist stable under Tom Cruise’s guidance and he would not allow it to fail.

I was horribly wrong. This film fails on so many levels it almost mystifies me. Similar to this year’s All the King’s Men, I found myself wondering how all this talent just went to waste.

The only positive to this movie is that is clocks in at 88 minutes.

Lions for Lambs Review

Can you remember when you went to high school? Remember how there always seemed to be that one person who tried being everything to everyone? This person would go out for a whole bunch of sports, take a stab at the school musical and run for class president. Remember this person?

Robert Redford’s Lions for Lambs is that person from high school.

The film strives to obtain too many things, without achieving anything. The creators want this to be a message movie. They want this movie to have a complex, interlacing plot. They want this movie to be an awards contender. They want this movie to be meaningful, but it is ultimately a hollow shell that does not know what it truly wants to be.

The film opens with a weathered Robert Redford, as a political science professor, telling his students to do something meaningful with their lives. Michael Peńa and Derek Luke, who are two students listening to Redford’s lecture, decide to take his advice to heart. The two friends join the Army which confounds Redford a bit.

The film then flashes to the interlacing plot which has Redford holding a conversation with a new student of his, Andrew Garfield, who lacks the same passion that Peńa and Luke have, but is significantly smarter. Redford tries to give his message to Garfield, who half-heartedly listens. Redford’s performance does come across as a college professor because he stands before the camera delivering long speeches and doing nothing else.

Meanwhile, Republican Presidential hopeful Jasper Irving invites a leftist journalist, Janine Roth, to his office to unveil a new strategic plan in Afghanistan that will ultimately defeat the Taliban. Irving, played by Tom Cruise, is like most Tom Cruise characters: Cocky, smart and sharply dressed. However, Cruise does manage to elevate the role a little bit by embracing the character’s wicked slyness. Meryl Streep plays the pessimistic journalist and just merely goes through the motions.

The most intriguing plot line in the film is Peńa and Luke’s story. After joining the Army, they are trapped behind enemy lines in Afghanistan. These are two talented young men who salvage the film’s performances, even though they are only a third of the story.

The film’s polished images, crisp editing and simplistic camerawork all get overshadowed by the performances that feel like they have been crafted by CNN and Fox News. The script does not offer any help as it tries to out Sorkin Aaron Sorkin. This results in disaster as the players are able to deliver the lines, but they is nothing substantiating them because the film wants to run in so many directions at one time it can not focus on one thing for more than two minutes at a time.

Similar to that person in high school, this film had the potential to be fantastic. There always seemed to be this feeling that if the film could have maintained its focus it would have been a diamond in the rough. Instead, it remains a piece of charcoal that may age well with time, but currently has nothing to offer.

When to See It: On TNT, when they’re not showing Top Gun or The Shawshank Redemption