It's happened to all of us at one time or another.

You know the ones. You've seen the hype, you read the book, or you loved the first movie and you're all pumped up, marking your calander and anxiously awaiting opening day. When it finally comes out, you rush to see it and end up leaving the theater shaking your head, bitterly dissapointed and wondering just what the hell happened?

So what were your biggest movie let-downs?

My most recent examples:


Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back - Loved Clerks and Dogma, but apart from a few good gags, this was just dumb.

Phantom Menace - This'll probably be on most peoples list. It was okay, but really, could any movie have lived up to the hype?

Gods and Generals - Gettysburg is one of my favorite films ever, but just about everyone has dumped on this prequel. I'll still be getting it on DVD, but I gotta wonder what went wrong.

Final Fantasy:TSW - The previews had me all worked up. Finally we'd be getting a hard SF story AND a serious animation. No singing animals or princess's. The FF games were great, so how could this one go wrong? But it did. Turned out to be a beautiful looking film with an absolutely awful script and muddy storyline.

Batman and Robin - Batman Forever wasn't a total waste... and Tim Burton's two Batman films were two of my favorite movies at the time. I expected it to suck... yet I couldn't help but feel that its craptaculousness exceeded my expectations.

Phantom Menace/Attack of the Clones - still like them... but it's just not the same. Worse acting, worse scripts... Lucas' digital revolution has given birth to lazy filmmaking. Maybe he'll take notice of how Lord of the Rings: TT handled its digital character. Less is more, George.

Planet of the Apes - ...still like Tim Burton... but this was poop.

There are many more... but these are the most obvious.

Johnny Mnemonic because the short story is classic Gibson. I don't know what happened in the movie but it's one of the worst things I've ever seen. Also, this movie ruined any chance of cyberpunk classics like Neuromancer or Snow Crash being made into movies any time soon. Both would be great. Lastly, I took a girl to the movie without reading any reviews, she was not exactly impressed. Luckly she stayed with me.

Road to Perdition could have been great, but Mendes incorporated too many noir/gangster cliches. The main bad-guy was totally hammy and stereotypical. The ending was pat and far from convincing. This movie wasted great performances from Hanks, Newman and particularly Law.

Panic Room. This movie was so close to being a classic, but it had too many scream-instructions-at-the-screen dumb sceens. Too many plot holes and too many cliches. I really wanted to like the movie, but I'll probably never see it again.

Sixth Sense: I figured it out 45 minutes before the movie ended. Admittedly, I knew there was a twist ending, but wasn't it sort-of obvious what was going to happen?

Batman Returns. Burton directing, Walken and DeVito starring. This should have been the ultimate comic book movie. moments of brilliance, but dull and dreary. A wasted opportunity. Come to think of it, Sleepy Hollow and Edward Scissorhands are the only Burton movies I've seen that lived up to their potential.

Slackers. OK, I know I should have known this would suck..but Schwartzenbaum (or however you spell his name) had one of my favorite performances ever in Rushmore, then he goes and makes this ****? Fastest career destruction ever.

I liked Phantom Menace, except for Anakin and Jar-Jar. I really liked AOTC, I actually believe that it's a good movie. No disappointment there.

The Avengers - I went to this one opening day since I was a fan of the original tv show and thought the film would be good. I was wrong.

And I guess I could say the new Star Wars films too.

I was underwhelmed by "Spirited Away".

"xXx". I expected a brainless Actionmovie, but it was far worse.

I'll just say the obvious... Battlefield Earth. I know it's a bad movie, so I went to the theatre expecting bad movie. But what happens before my eyes is worse than my expectation.
Also Michael Bay's flicks.

Spiderman - This movie was alright but it could have been so much better.

The Bonfire of the Vanities. It should have been a classic.

I would have to say without question the Star Wars prequels. I wanted to like them so much, I really did and I tried very hard to, but I just couldn't get over the terrible acting and dialogue. As a result of my major disappointment I am considering not seeing EpIII in the theatres(or at least not the very first showing at midnight like I have for Eps I and II).

Tops is definitely Natural Born Killers. I expected to see a classic, and I did. A classic bowel movement.

Another semi-disappointment was My Big Fat Greek Wedding. It was okay, but I guess I got carried away by the hype.

Honk!

Reign of Fire - I expected more from Rob Bowman. The script is awful. There is never a sense of awe(you'd think the filmmakers would want to show off the CG dragons as much as possible) and they needed more explanation as to how the dragons took over the world.

X-Men - Even though I own the two-disc set, I still think this is a missed opportunity. I blame FOX studio execs for moving up the release date and shortening the movie to a paltry 90 minutes. I have a feeling X2 is going to be everything X-Men could've been.

Ummm, no...

The Fifth Element - I was really pumped to see this. REALLY pumped. I never saw any of Besson's previous films, so I didn't know what to expect. I don't consider this one of the worst films ever, but I was crushed when it ended. This is the most disappointing theatrical experience of my life.

What Lies Beneath - I am a major fan of Robert Zemeckis, but I left this movie feeling angry.

Yeah, I love a good plot twist in a film that I didn't see coming (eg Fight Club) but I figured it out in Sixth Sense within the first half hour (I'll admit, like you, I knew there was a twist of some sort, so maybe I was just looking at the film more carefully to see if I could figure it out). Then again, I took film criticism in university, so maybe that taught me to "read" all films carefully.

Blair Witch 2

This movie sucked beyond imagination

Of recent major disappointments, I’d have to say LOTR-TT. Based on the strength of the first installment and the hypnotic trailer, I expected the movie to rock. Instead, I found it butt-numbingly boring—too much ho-hum action combined with obvious CGI for my taste.

Saving Private Ryan

Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle - My buddy Daryl, a big animation fan, and I saw the trailer for this in front of Galaxy Quest. The 3D animation looked great in the trailer and in the completed film......too bad about the script.

Event Horizon - saw a preview for this on HBO about a month before it came out and it looked like an interesting sci-fi thriller. When I actually saw it I was unprepared for the level of gore and the freaked-out final scene. I like the "Alien" franchise, granted, but EH went way beyond that.

And speaking of the "Alien" franchise....I'll add Alien Resurrection. The mercenary "protagonists" were completely unpleasant, there was little suspense, and the human/alien hybrid at the end looked like Odo from Deep Space 9 had acid splashed on him.

Edward

Recently, Phone Booth. I was expecting a lot more.

Historically...hmmm...

Full Metal Jacket
American Pie 2
Fast and the Furious

Stanley Kubrick

Add my vote to Batman and Robin. Arnold as Mr. Freeze didn't help, but looking at it now the whole movie feels like one big homosexual joke.

The Phantom Menace (and of course the subsequent Attack of the Clones) -- after waiting so long we come up with this sh*t

Lord of the Rings -- I was hoping Peter Jackson would break away from the big movie mode, and come up with a magical rendition of the series. he didn't.

The Matrix -- visually powerful, but quite pretentious in plot and philosophy. i actually fell asleep, the first time I saw it.

The Godfather -- glorified violence, i might give Godfather 2 a second chance though. i haven't seen it in awhile, and I remember it to be quite powerful.

Got to agree on this one. But, I would go as far to say it was a POS.

The script was horrible, the acting was wretched, and the direction was awful.

I wanted to see an action film, I got no action film. I got actors spouting off shitty dialogue that tried to be oh so comedic, but failed miserably. Action scenes that were completely shot all wrong. Actually of the two big underwhelming actions scenes this film tried to pose as a drama. Please.

Also, the film can't be that good when every actor was totally wrong for their roles in this film, even Patrick Stewart who even looks like Prof. X !!!!



Finally, the only reason I am seeing X2 is because of Brian Cox.

The Thin Red Line.

Following close on the heels of Saving Private Ryan I was expecting a Pacific theater version of the same movie.
Could I be more wrong? I lived years hating the movie until I bought the DVD and reevaluated it. Now i've come to peace with the movie and what it's trying to say.

WindTalkers.

I can ignore a lot of crap in war movies because I love the genre. But Windtalkers never suspended my disbelief. Woo didn't even try to get the details right. It was just a slapdash affair. The entire movie was an opportunity lost.