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[Gopher]

First off, what is this thread NOT: this is not the "I hate this movie because I think it sucks" thread. This thread is about disappointing movies. You thought it was bad because the trailer looked awesome, but the plot turned out to be dumb? You thought it was great until they tried that ridiculous twist at the end of the film? You thought casting Robin Williams as a mass murderer just didn't work? Post about it in here. And remember, dissapointing and sucking are two different things. Okay, I'll start.

*Ahem*

War. Jet Li and Jason Statham in a movie about rival gangs, and the assassins and federal agents in between. But who cares, it's Jet Li and Jason Statham! The two most renown martial arts masters in Hollywood! How could this movie be disappointing?! Well, if I see these two in the same movie, I wanna see some kickass fighting sequences, some awesome car-chase scenes, and a GOOD story.

For the most part, the story was okay. A bit cheesy at times but it was acceptable until they tried that ridiculous "WHAT A TWEEST" bit in the end where it turns out that Jet Li, the assassin, is really Statham's (the federal agent) partner who was believed to be dead. Not only that, but Statham, who was portrayed as a heroic agent trying to make right throughout the entire movie, turns out to be a frickin' informant for the Yakuza, and the reason for Jet Li's family being murdered. I just thought the movie was completely ruind by that. War would have been a great summer action flick if not for the convoluted ending.

Good acting, good fighting, the car-chase scene was lame, and the twists were unbearable.

....

Okay, your turn.

[Asis]

Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street

This movie is perfect for this thread, because it's not bad. And it wasn't disappointing for it's quality either (like, say, any Uwe Boll movie) 'twas just... boring.

Don't take me wrong: I like musicals. Not like I love a good steak, but I like it nevertheless. I watch Opera. I wish I could afford to visit Broadway. But still, I didn't liked this movie.

Why? The quality was excellent and the design was superb. The city changed depending on the Main Character's feelings. The city looked fabulous when the Sailor was singing, yet it turned dark, rusty and dangerous when Johnny took his place. The scene when they started to eat the meat pies was specially significant in this matter.

Then, I repeat myself, why? Why I didn't like it? Let me put it this way: Right now I have two books in my backpack:

-The Social Contract by Rousseau
-The new adventures of Sherlock Holmes.

I like the first one because it's a legendary book, used by French Revolutionaries and Russian communists alike. With a lot of interesting thoughts and theories, specially important when you read the biography of the author. That book was one of the sparks that started the French Revolution, damnit!

Still, even as meaningful and important that book is, sometimes I'm not in the mood for something like that. Sometimes, I don't want to think. Some people watch action movies. Some people never want to think and watch football all day long. I read novels.
Sherlock Holmes' are ideal for this: you don't have to think... much.
If you do, you wander away from the ideal point of view, as in, Doctor Watson's.
If you do, you began to guess certain murders. And that ain't good, y'know?

But I digress. My point was: Sweeney Todd wasn't bad, it just wasn't what I expected. What *I* wanted to see.
I wanted a good Tim Burton Movie about assassinations. I got a musical with a few cuts here and there but all not similar, but exactly the same in both place and location. (Neck, Barber's seat) I also got some good songs, but others were just annoying. Specially that little kiddo's. The line 'I feel you, Johanna' was repeated 20 times.
Twenty-frikkin'-times.

Still, hats off for the ending part, specially when he kills that crazy, poor girl. Because, let's be honest, everyone knew that she was his wife by that point, right?

[Pyro]

Cloverfield

I was highly upset about this movie, specifically not because of the plot. The plot was a time tested classic plot used before such as Godzilla, but taken into a more real account. If this horribly fictional and impossible thing happened, this is how it would happen. Makes sense in the land of fakebelieve, but my problem was with specific things within the movie.

1) The camera hurt my eyes, it wasn't motion sickness, it literally hurt my eyes to watch the movie. I understand it was supposed to be real pretty much a guy filming a party, but come on man, balance it a little.

2) The monster I was very dissapointed with. It wasn't to say that ya know, the monster couldn't kill things, it just felt weak to me. Like the monster itself had cool abilities and things like that, but he really didn't look that part in my head. I was expecting some phenominal, I mean, it beat the entire military and destroyed all of NY easily pushing down buildings. My foot could have made a slightly scarier monster.

3) The end. Here's the spoiler alert. WARNING - SPOILER: The main character gets eaten by the monster and drops the camera and one of the co-characters grabs it and runs under the bridge with a bunch of other people. The bridge collapses, everybody dies. The End. I was left very very upset in such an anti-climactic ending. I was hoping much more for a bit more closure, knowing where the monster went or what he was doing there or what not. No, nothing. Despite how good the end idea can be, you need to leave the audience with some kind of closure knowing what happened. Leaving it completely open is ridiculous, there will be no sequal, this was a one shot movie, and I would never buy it.

[Gopher]

^ Thank you Pyro. I will never have to suffer from the gross disappointment of Cloverfield. Not that I'm saying that it's a bad movie, but I sure as hell would have wanted MY money back.

I saw "We Own the Night" last night. Joaquin Phoenix, a club owner in the '80s has to help his cop brother Mark Wahlberg and chief-of-police dad fight a war on ruthless Russian drugdealers. It was a great film, I thought, but there were two things that I thought could have been done differently.

1: Did Mark Wahlberg have to be that much of a pussy? For all the "tough guy" lines he was spewing out throughout the film, he really gets downplayed. He gets shot in the face, spends the first half of the movie in a hospital, then in the only action scene he's in (at the end) he goes into shock from hearing gunfire. At the end of the movie, Wahlberg gets a desk job, leaving his brother to do all the police work from now on. I like Wahlberg, but he just looks like a chicken in this movie. It's like having an action movie with Arnold Schwarzenegger, and all he does is get hurt and scared. The very definition of disappointment.

2: The final confrontation between Joaquin Phoenix's character and "Vadim", the drug dealer organizing all the attacks on the dude's family. I was expecting some kind of one-on-one ass-kicking, but he just shoots the dude, and that's it. I mean, when they were doing that same scene in "Heat" with Al Pacino trying to find and kill the bad guy Robert De Niro, they at least got to have a decent exchange of gunfire before the former took out the latter. Phoenix's "shoot the guy in the chest with a shotgun and just walk away" move was just lacking.

Still, it really kicks ass. There's nothing bad enough to wanna avoid the movie, so if you like action movies then go see it.

[DarkGunn]

Starship Troopers 2

There are usually a few reasons when you don't see a movie on the big screen and instead it's sitting on the shelf in a DVD store. This movie only justifies the reason why.

The storyline is the same as the previous title, the bugs are a threat to mankind and we have to destroy them blah blah blah. I wasn't surprised though, it's what makes the series good.

It starts off with one of those recruitment videos for the Mobile Infantry, then changes to a squad of marines being overrun by the bugs. At which point, two of the senses are offended. Your eyes and ears.

First of all the guns in the movie do not sound like guns. You see these highly trained soldiers using these big guns, only to make them sound like... toy laser things. Those cartoon pistols that shoot the signs that say "bang" sound better.
At which point, the camera shows its charm, it moves so fast it makes it difficult to see what's happening and to make things worse the soldiers are fighting in a sandstorm, meaning 0 visibility for you. You can't tell shit because of which, just a goddamn blurry screen.

There's only one thing that makes the movie truly disappointing, the acting.
Throughout the whole movie you're tortured with these useless actors and their horrible... uhh... acting. At the beginning the soldiers are retreating and this Chinese dude gets impaled by one of the bug's claws. This guy must be super human because even though the claw is twice the size of him, he was screaming as if it were a paper cut.

As bad as these may be, the movie was still pretty cool. The plot is new and it introduced a new bug that could take over the human body by entering your mouth or ass. Quite a scary way to go, but it's a bug I guess.
So even with these factors, the movie wasn't terrible, just disappointing. It could’ve been better.

[Elmo]

Pyro wrote: 3) The end. Here's the spoiler alert. WARNING - SPOILER: The main character gets eaten by the monster and drops the camera and one of the co-characters grabs it and runs under the bridge with a bunch of other people. The bridge collapses, everybody dies. The End. I was left very very upset in such an anti-climactic ending. I was hoping much more for a bit more closure, knowing where the monster went or what he was doing there or what not. No, nothing. Despite how good the end idea can be, you need to leave the audience with some kind of closure knowing what happened. Leaving it completely open is ridiculous, there will be no sequal, this was a one shot movie, and I would never buy it.

There actually IS going to be a sequel, I read it somewhere. It's going to be called Monsterous or something... I wouldn't see it though, simply because I get motion sickness very easily, and if I didn't leave from Cloverfield at the time that I did, I might have thrown up, because I was gagging in the bathroom and my friend had to control my balance.

I liked how the end didn't leave you with much information... the point WAS to leave it open, and get you to see the sequel. Even if there was no sequel in the future, I didn't think that having closure of what happened was necessary, in my opinion. Overall I thought the movie was alright, but like you said, I wish the camera was controlled better XD;

[Pyro]

Elmo wrote: There actually IS going to be a sequel, I read it somewhere. It's going to be called Monsterous or something...

If they make a sequel i'm going to start fire bombing