The Five Most Disappointing Films of 2014

There seems to be a few every year: movies that are not necessarily bad, but fail to live up to whatever expectations have been set up for them.  They are the American Hustles, Batman Returns and Godfather: Part 3s of the world (and, yes, outright dreck like Spider-Man 3).  I've even enjoyed most of these films to one degree or another (although certainly not my #1 choice).  Through either hype or misplaced talent or never quite coming together the way that they could have, these five movies were the biggest letdowns of 2015 for me.

5) A Million Ways to Die in the West - I had some concerns about Ted when it came out.  Although I loved MacFarlane's outragious brand of comedy, a movie about a foul-mouthed Teddy Bear and an overgrown man-child didn't seem like a particularly well-thought out premise.  A friend of mine was quick to defend it, arguing that he "trust[ed] MacFarlane to make [him] laugh," so I gave it a shot and was glad that I did.  21 Jump Street aside, Ted was easily the funniest movie of 2012.

Naturally MacFarlane's big-screen followup had some big shoes to fill.  The result?  An alright movie that was just funny enough to keep from being boring.  It wasn't bad by any means, but it wasn't especially good, either.  It traded away some of the more sophisticated humor that made Ted, Family Guy and American Dad so fantastic for a more diarrhetic type of comedy.  It was basically a better version of "Jesus, Mary and Joseph," which sadly isn't saying all that much.

"If You Only Have a Moustache" is a great song, as is the ballad "A Million Ways to Die," but nothing else in the song quite lives up to those combined three minutes fifty-eight seconds of its run-time.  And while Neil Patrick Harris was fantastic as the mustachioed douchebag who runs the local moustache parlor, everybody has pretty much caught onto the joke of making Doogie Howser a dick by now.

4) Lucy - 2014 was a pretty big year for Scarlett Johansson no mater how you look at it.  She achieved some critical notoriety with Chef, played off of Chris Evans to great effect in Captain America: The Winter Soldier and even headlined a blockbuster of her own.  But while Lucy is the most pleasingly pro-science film of the year, as an sci-fi / action film directed by the accomplished Luc Besson, it was pretty forgettable.

Don't get me wrong, though.  It was about as entertaining as it needed to be, used its scientifically iffy premise of unlocking hidden potential in the brain to great effect and had a few memorable visuals thrown in for good measure (my favorite being intercutting wildlife footage with the actual goings-on of the film as a visual metaphor for Lucy's "fight or flight" response kicking in).  The problem is that the film doesn't do much beyond a rushed set-up, an escalating series of mostly superfluous chase scenes and a payoff that was far more impressed with itself than I was with it.  It's an interesting counterpoint to Watchmen's Doctor Manhattan, but really no more than that.

3) Son of Batman - DC redoubled their focus on animated films this year, promising a small-screen shared universe analogous to the MCU but more appropriately rooted in the old DCAU (which included Batman: The Animated Series, The New Batman Adventures, Batman Beyond, Superman: The Animated Series, Static Shock, The Zeta Project, Justice League, Justice League: Unlimited and a handful of Batman films).  They launched this new inter-film continuity with Justice League: War, which currently stands as one of my favorite films of 2014.  Their followup to this, an adaptation of Batman and Son, was not quite as amazing as its forebearer.

While the animation is without a doubt excellent, and the voice talent behind the characters well-chosen, the film was only alright.  It immediately kills off the immortal Ra's al Ghul.  Seriously: they kill him off.  He finds himself on the losing end of a fight with Deathstroke and dies inches away from the Lazarus Pit.  There goes any hope I had of further appearances from my favorite Batman villain in the new DCAU.

Damien is a fun character, and goes as dark as he needs to, but is more off-putting than endearing.  While it's fun to see Batman as a stodgy parental figure, it doesn't give him much room to actually be Batman.  The plot, while serviceable, is not especially engaging.  I can only hope that the dynamic duo's next outing will be more of a return to form for the Caped Crusaders. 

2) Deliver Us from Evil  - It should come as no surprise that horror is my favorite film genre.  After seeing Deliver Us from Evil's unnerving trailer, I thought that we were finally getting a possession film that not only understood exactly why The Exorcist worked, but exploded its scope to a truly pandemic scale.

What we received was a worse permutation of the same possession-based scares than better-made Judeo-Christian horror films (The Exorcism of Emily Rose and The Last Exorcism being the best of these).  While I understand what the beginning was trying to accomplish, it ended up being overly long and generally unneeded.  The promise of more wide-spread possessions was delivered, but underwhelmingly, playing off more like a bargain-bin slasher than as a religious horror.  And while the priest was an amazing character who played off of the protagonist to great effect, his introduction to the film was simply too little, too late.

1) Cabin Fever 3: Patient Zero  - I don't really know what this film was trying to accomplish.  It set itself up as a prequel to the first film, but that story was shoved into Sean Astin's back story.  It plays out like two mostly unrelated sequels intercut together to pad out the run-time to feature length, neither of which are even remotely good.  Only Sean Astin's character has any sort of depth to him, and he's forced to play second fiddle to a bachelor party filled with obnoxious man-children.

It was an unequivocal mess from start to finish, but I can't help but feel that there was actually a really good movie to be made from this.  The first film showed how the slow-burning terror of a flesh-eating virus can work especially well when given time to let the inevitability death-by-liquefaction sink in.  Sean Astin is a phenomenal actor who, perplexingly, seems to choose the worst possible projects since his career high in The Lord of the Rings.  His character's backstory really did seem interesting, and I would have loved to have seen it play out in full.

Hopefully 2015's most anticipated releases will prove to be better than some of 2014's.  Here's to hoping, at least.

If you liked what you read, please share this post on social media and subscribe to this blog in order to keep up with the latest posts.  Ask questions or share your thoughts in the comments section below.