Best of 2014 - The Biggest Disappointments

Tim Falkenberg January 6th, 2015 - 8:00 AM

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We’ve all walked into movies we expected great things from; maybe the trailer was awesome, or it came highly recommended. Maybe it was an adaptation of a favorite book, or the latest from a treasured director. Sometimes those expectations are vindicated. Other times…not so much.

This list calls out the movies we wanted more from. They’re not always the worst movies of the year; in fact, several of the movies on this list are ones we liked quite a bit, they just didn’t measure up to what they could have been. It’s a game of potential vs. actual, and these are the movies that came up short.

A Million Ways to Die in the West

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I love Seth MacFarlane’s work in general, but this was a misfire on so many levels. Going in, I thought he might be trying for something of an homage to Blazing Saddles or to a lesser extent The Three Amigos (and yes, the distance between those is a stretch, I know) but I never felt a real though-line of a plot. The film seemed like a group of interconnected sketches instead of something cohesive. The performances were fine, definitely up to the material they had to work with. There were a few laughs, but more often than not, the jokes landed with a thud.

— Kerry Kelaher Fredeen

Big Hero 6

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Big Hero 6 is a perfectly good film, but considering the pedigree of the forces behind it, it really should have been a few steps higher on the evolutionary ladder. What in this film was truly beyond the material that we’ve seen in the recent slate of Marvel films or the highly imaginative Disney films of the past few years? Didn’t we get a more compelling take on the film’s central relationship back in The Iron Giant? Judged in isolation, Big Hero 6 is entertaining and competently put together. But taken in as a part of bigger complexes around it, the film about inventors really feels like it’s behind the curve, not breaking new ground.

— Gabriel Urbina

The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby: Them

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Eleanor Rigby is the odd film that’s disappointing more because of how it was distributed than for the movie itself. Originally conceived as two films meant to be shown back to back, one following each person in a recently failed relationship, the only version most people were able to see was a Frankenstein’s monster of the two cut together. Which is doubly depressing because James McAvoy and Jessica Chastain are brilliant in the leading roles. There are moments where the so-called “Them” version of the movie actually works, but that just made me hunger for the “Him” and “Her” versions all the more. I even live in Los Angeles and tried to find a place the real version of this supposed-to-be-a-double-feature was playing, and I couldn’t ever track one down.

— Tim Falkenberg

Godzilla

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I was excited to see my favorite radioactive dinosaur back on the big screen. Too bad the director wasn’t interested in showing him. Considering the Big G’s lack of screen time, focus on heavy-handed human “drama,” and some baffling camera work, I have to ask, was Godzilla someone’s passion project or merely an obligation?

— Erik Paschall

Inherent Vice

I’ll preface this by saying I’m a huge Paul Thomas Anderson fan. However, after perhaps the apex of his career thus far in There Will Be Blood, Inherent Vice marks the second straight serious misfire. Perhaps I’m too young or unaware to appreciate the time period Anderson is trying to evoke here, but Inherent Vice felt like a serious chore to sit through. The movie is – purposely one supposes – meandering and rudderless, much like the private eye played by Joaquin Phoenix. As an audience member, it feels like a party I’ve been invited to where everyone else is high and the drugs are all gone.

— Greg Rodgers

Interstellar

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In no way a movie that I disliked, but with Interstellar I felt that Nolan’s reach exceeded his grasp. He had lofty ambitions and hefty ideas he wanted to convey, but he wasn’t able to communicate them in ways that were visually and narratively effective. The result is a film that sometimes felt disjointed and sacrificed a lot of character for themes that didn’t always work within the story they’re presented. There were individual moments that were nothing short of brilliant, but those moments were sparse and most of the movie had significant missed notes.

— Eduardo Ramos

Magic in the Moonlight

Despite controversy (and my own chagrin) I am a dedicated Woody Allen fan. From the ‘60s until now, he has rarely skipped a beat in my book. Also considering that his last two films – Midnight in Paris and Blue Jasmine – could be some of his best work, I was expecting Magic in the Moonlight to continue his hot streak. Instead, Allen has recycled the “meaning of life” themes that populate his body of work failed to do so in any compelling new ways. Magic in the Moonight missed the mark with a story that was a bit tired and lackluster, and Allen failed to coax anything exceptional from either Colin Firth or Emma Stone.

— Rachel Lutack

Muppets Most Wanted

I loved 2011’s The Muppets for the care Jason Segel and Nicholas Stoller showed the characters and for recapturing the humor that propelled the original run of films and the television show to American classic status. So even without Segel co-writing the script, I was eagerly anticipating director James Bobin and writer Nicholas Stoller’s return to the franchise. Throw in a crime plot reminiscent of The Great Muppet Caper and it seemed like a winner. Ironically, the lack of any real human characters left the film without any of the feeling of its predecessor. Despite a fun performance from Ricky Gervais as Dominic Badguy, the film needed a more grounded role for Tina Fey or Ty Burrell.

— Tyler Lyon

X-Men: Days of Future Past

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I had high hopes for this one after First Class, which I walked away from it looking forward to learning how Charles Xavier would move on from losing his friend and adopted sister while still maintaining enough of his idealism to found his Institute and bring together the X-Men. Instead Wolverine hijacks the plot by going back in time and telling Xavier that he HAS to do those things in order to prevent a war that kills everyone. This approach cheapens Charles’ character development by just telling him what he will do in the future instead of letting him get there organically. The rest of the plot brings us right back to retreading the same story beats from every other X-Men movie. Mutants want to be left alone but still end up destabilizing society, whether because they can’t control their powers or because one of them throws a temper tantrum, and humans are supposed to just roll with that because mutants are people too. If Magneto can destabilize the most powerful nation in the world on a whim, then why shouldn’t humans be afraid of mutants?

— Charlie Burroughs

The Zero Theorem

It’s easy to pick on big budget tentpoles as most disappointing (did you really have no clue the havoc you would wreak on society, The Amazing Spider-Man 2?), but there’s a particular kind of hurt when a director you love just misses. A “just miss” is different from a misfire or a misstep insofar as with the latter you can understand why it failed, but with the former you still see how it could have succeeded. There were so many fascinating elements with Terry Gilliam’s The Zero Theorem, but most of these things felt unexplored or underdeveloped. Unlike so many movies these days, this is one film that deserved to be longer, if only to give us more of its distinctively Gilliam visual style. I can’t remember the last film that I more wanted to get into its characters (many of whom seem to have substantial parts left on the cutting room floor), universe, and philosophies. Hopefully, there’s a longer cut that exists somewhere, because there’s something great in the DNA of The Zero Theorem; the theatrical cut just couldn’t do it justice.

— Brett Harrison Davinger

See more of the Best of 2014

Best of 2014 – The Biggest Disappointments