The 2016 Movie Year will probably be known for several things. The year of the Summer of Disappointments. The year of Too Many Comic Book Movies – even though no one says anything about how many cartoons are released each year; our standards are so low that even Trolls is Certified Fresh.
But it’s also a year where we’ve had a bevy of sequels that have been commercial and critical disappointments. From Independent Day: Resurgence to Inferno to The Huntsman: Winter’s War (which I already wrote a piece on) to Now You See Me 2 (and its interminable card toss sequence), these movies haven’t captured our imagination like their predecessors have. It’s hard to pinpoint specific reason why – in some instances, it’s because the new movie adheres too strongly to the formula while in others, it’s because it deviates too much from it. So let’s run down some of this year’s most notable sequels (and representatives of their genres) to see how/why they failed – the comedy Zoolander No. 2, the horror Blair Witch, and the action Jack Reacher: Never Go Back.
Comedy: ZOOLANDER NO. 2
Be forewarned Bad Santa 2. Trying to do a sequel a decade-plus hence is a next-to-impossible undertaking, unless you’re Richard Linklater with the Before series, Hal Hartley with the Grim Family Saga, or … I’m sure there are others. Over the past several years’ journey throughout nostalgia, we’ve seen it fail for dramas (Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps (1987 –> 2010) is still probably Oliver Stone’s worst movie, even worse than Snowden), as well as comedies (Anchorman 2 barely pulled it off while the less said about Dumb and Dumber To the better.) And Zoolander No. 2, the 2016 sequel to the 2001 eventual cult classic, was yet another that just missed the point.
The biggest weakness with most comedy sequels regardless of when they’re made is that they end up repeating the same jokes as the first movie – yet this also ends up being their biggest strength. With most comedies, we don’t care about the characters as characters, we care about the characters as joke delivery systems. We don’t want to see them do different things, we don’t want to see them grow, we want to see them in the same comedy wheelhouse where we met them. Even great comedic performances, which I would say Ben Stiller’s Derek Zoolander falls under, are defined by the gags more than the journey.
Every genre certainly bears some repetition – it makes sense, why mess with a successful formula? – but with comedy it’s more essential because there’s rarely anything else to the films but the jokes we like. It also explains why “part twos” are traditionally rushed so quickly into production. Studios have to capitalize on that relatively brief moment when the gags are still fresh and floating around in the zeitgeist (usually shortly after the initial film hits the home market), but before they have worn out their welcome due to people repeating the quotable lines to the point they become stale.
When you take that limited window and try to stretch it to 15 years, you get the mess that is Zoolander No. 2. The first one was born from satirizing model/fashion culture so it had a premise on which to drape itself. The sequel, lost most sequels, had to rely on past glories rather than update its fodder, which speaks to yet another crucial problem in comedy sequels: evolution. Comedy has a greater tendency to change over a shorter period of time than other genres. A good car chase is a good car chase, a good fright is a good fright, but with a comedy, pacing, timing, subjects for ridicule all change relatively frequently, there’s a limited shelf-life for ‘topical’ references, and people can “age” out of certain types of humor – there’s a reason it’s called juvenile. The best comedy writers and performers evolve with the times (and I’d include Ben Stiller in that group), but we’ve seen time and time again with these sequels that it’s hard for know where to fit in between the two worlds. Do you play to a 2016 audience and the new comedy flavors, or to a 2001 audience and hope to capitalize primarily on greatest hits-style nostalgia?
Yet for all its flaws, Zoolander No. 2‘s greatest sin was overexplaining the jokes that worked in the original to a point of condescension. In the original, Derek Zoolander’s stupidity was accepted as part of the character, we didn’t need people constantly telling us that he’s stupid because we understood he was, and everyone in his universe was. Yet in this one, we’re constantly being told that he’s an idiot; as though we couldn’t pick up on that fact. One of the most memorable gags in the first movie is that Zoolander’s modeling faces all look the same but people accept them as different, as though fashionistas understand a language that us normals cannot. In this, his images are run through a computer program where they analyze the curvature of each Zoolander eyebrow thus quantitatively providing us with ‘science’ behind it. (We didn’t need midichlorians the first time, we don’t need them now.) Even the moment from the first one where Zoolander’s Magnum face stops the throwing star in midair is no longer some absurdist bit of random comedy, but ends up becoming some Force-level power that he and his son can use as a form of telekinesis. While some comedy sequels can overcome these flaws, Zoolander No. 2 is not alone in falling into these traps. Be forewarned Bad Santa 2.
Horror: BLAIR WITCH
While horror sequels, like all sequels, have a tendency to repeat the same formula, it actually allows for far more variation and more experimentation than other genres. Whereas we want to hear the same jokes again, we want to see different and more varied deaths. Even the series themselves usually shift genres, often transitioning from pure horror into dark comedy and then into all-out camp. We accept this, often because horror movies are released with such unrelenting frequency that the filmmakers have no choice but to adapt, and horror audiences seem comfortable with changing (often to the point of flat-out mocking) the premise.
So where did Blair Witch go wrong? Well, everywhere. Opting for a soft reboot/sequel angle with this franchise is utterly perplexing. If any series could have benefited from a full-on remake rather than a sequel/reboot, it’s probably this one. The original The Blair Witch Project from 1999 is remembered primarily for its marketing campaign and being among the first to successfully go viral. The last Blair Witch property was Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2 in 2000, which was a meta sequel so poorly received it killed the franchise for over 15 years. And without some iconic character – your Freddy Kruger, Jason Vorhees, Jigsaw, the Invisible Hand of Death itself in Final Destination, chair falling in Paranormal Activity – Blair Witch as an intellectual property couldn’t remain in the pop culture cloud. Guy Standing in the Corner is not exactly your Good Guys Chucky doll.
Now sure, the full-on reboot fails most of the time (e.g. Nightmare on Elm Street, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Halloween, Friday the 13th, likely the upcoming Friday the 13th remake remake), but it’s not like that’s stopped filmmakers before. And unlike those other series, it’s not like we have any actual relationship with the Blair Witch that must be preserved. Besides, it’s not unprecedented that a full-on reboot could work; Fede Alvarez pulled it off in 2013 with Evil Dead, which was a full-on remake of a film franchise so beloved that its protagonist has his own TV show on Starz that is in its second season. Now while that probably means we won’t see the continuing adventures of Jane Levy’s Mia, it nevertheless got some of the critical acclaim eluding these other properties. Plus, Blair Witch filmmakers Adam Wingard and Simon Barrett are effective in playing into genre conventions while making them feel fresh so they’d be among the best choices for doing something unique with a brand we only kind of remember.
But still, why the sequel angle? No one remembers a mythology from 1999 that was murky at best anyway. Making the plot being about the brother of “I’m so scared!” Heather going on a quest to find his sister 15-20 years after the fact (and after anyone has thought about her or her two cronies) feels more than forced, but a bit disingenuous. To be fair, horror movies can work great with characters broken by the past and fixated by its specter hovering over the present. From Dr. Loomis in Halloween to the siblings in Oculus, we can see how this element can be used effectively, but Heather’s brother just seems like an average guy. We never get a sense of the damage the incident had on Heather’s brother or his family, and there are many ways they could have shown how – maybe he’s a minor celebrity about Burkittsville, maybe he tried to capitalize on his sister’s disappearance – but he has no real personality other than ‘guy who holds the camera.’ Without the tragedy of a life (or lives) lost due to obsession, we lose one of horror’s most potent tools.
And these problems plague the film before it actually starts. After it begins, we run into a whole mess of other issues. Found footage loses its impact when there are so many cameras shooting with cinema-level quality. The subtle (arguably too subtle) horror of the first one is replaced with textual claims that time is moving at different speeds, and the “is it real or is in it the mind” component is replaced with flying tents and literal demons. Not that any of these elements would be bad on their own (and there are some sequences that do work), but Blair Witch was never able to overcome the initial hurdle of “why does this exist?” Sometimes you just need to start over; why they didn’t in this case is beyond me.
Action: JACK REACHER: NEVER GO BACK
Comedy sequels are for laughs, horror sequels are for death, and action sequels are for, obviously, action. We want more elaborate and creative set pieces (until we complain about everything being too grandiose, and it turns out nobody knows what they want anyway). As such, this genre benefits greatly from a quality main character, otherwise we might as well be watching an anthology of action scenes. We want the cocky, compelling, charismatic lead – your John McClane, James Bond, Indiana Jones – or the flat, boring lead – your Jason Bourne, Vin Diesel – but we want a lead.
The first Jack Reacher from 2012 was surprisingly charming. Although Tom Cruise’s Mission: Impossible movies have the big budget, the big cast, and the big set pieces, Jack Reacher had a unique quality of its own. I’d argue that it’s a cooler movie than any installment of Cruise’s trademark series. It had a darkly comic bent (that is particularly rare in a PG-13 movie) and a very distinctive personality. The pithy dialogue (such as in the bar scene), the classic car car chase, the villain unexpectedly cast and excellently played by famed director Werner Herzog were just some of the memorable elements in the Christopher McQuarrie feature. If there’s a short-hand example of what made this movie stand out, it’s this bathroom fight. It’s physical yet smart, borderline slapsticky yet brutal, and shows a directorial flair for creative use of space and blocking. Additionally, Jack Reacher wasn’t just an action movie, it was a murder mystery that invited us to figure out the truth along with the main characters.
Plus there was the main character: Jack Reacher, the epitome of the drifter character. He didn’t care about finding a love interest, he didn’t care about making friends – he cared about finding the truth and getting justice by any means necessary. With most of our action heroes who will either not kill, go on lectures about not killing, or kill in a way that, to quote Mel Gibson, reflects “violence without conscience,” it was nice to see a protagonist who was willing to get his hands dirty and do the morally ambiguous things generally not seen in a PG-13 movie. Even James Bond didn’t kill Blofeld at the end of Spectre. (As an aside, I never read any of Lee Child’s Jack Reacher books so I have no connection to the character’s literary description; Cruse played him well and he was fun to watch. That’s all anyone should really want.)
So what happened with this year’s sequel? Jack Reacher: Never Go Back. The only word I can come up with for this misguided effort is “retooling,” in the television sense. All of the hard edges that defined the character and the initial movie were notably absent. The Jack Reacher who would shoot a defenseless elderly man was replaced with some much softer version of the character. This definitive loner was given both a potential love interest and a potential daughter, and he cared. While Reacher in the first one wouldn’t want to see harm to innocents, the fact that he could just move on without looking back was part of his appeal.
Yet even aside from the character shift, everything else was watered down too. Instead of being tasked to solve a mystery and ending up too deep, Jack is the target of a conspiracy pretty early on and thus all we have is running. Literally, running. He and love interest/partner Cobie Smulders’ Major Turner do a lot of calisthenics. All of the action sequences were tame and lifeless – gun fights, foot chases, and fist fights were shockingly unimaginative. However, it should be noticed that unlike the first one, which was written and directed by McQuarrie (who is currently doing the next Mission: Impossible movie), this one was made by By-The-Numbers-Oscar-Bait Maven Ed Zwick, a filmmaker who is essentially Brett Ratner with an Academy polish.
Does this mean the end for Jack Reacher? Hopefully not, because the first one is genuinely really good and it would be great to see that incarnation of Jack Reacher return. And remember, action movies can right their course. Cruise himself made it work with Mission: Impossible II, which came back with the franchise resurrecting Mission: Impossible III and whose two subsequent sequels have maintained an exceedingly positive reputation. And who can forget Die Hard? Die Hard 2: Die Harder came back with the far superior Die Hard with a Vengeance – which was then unfortunately followed with the shameful Die Hard Fights Computers and Die Hard Fights Russia. So…at the very least maybe we can get a good third installment.
The next major sequel we’re going to get is Bad Santa 2 on November 23, 2016, it and already has a remarkable 25% on Rotten Tomatoes. This film, the follow-up to the 2003 original, will probably follow down the unfortunate path of Zoolander No. 2 and Jack Reacher: Never Go Back. Like with the Stiller starrer, it’s been over a decade since the first one, and the jokes seem essentially the same – except lacking the hard edged novelty that made the first movie so good. And, like Reacher, I predict a lot of character retooling. Billy Bob Thornton’s Willie Stokes’ will still ostensibly be a rascal, but by introducing his far more ‘bad’ mother (played by Kathy Bates) and giving a tangible reason for his scoundrelness, they’re obviously giving the movie a villain against whom he can play less bad and redeem himself at the end.
Sequels have always been hard to pull off. It might even be harder now that we’ve become accustomed to more serialized and/or interconnected storytelling. The ‘one-off mission’ format might never be fully abandoned, but it definitely feels lacking. This year’s X-Men: Apocalypse is just one example of an okay movie that suffers from feeling disconnected to a larger universe (even its own X-iverse). It’ll be interesting to see how James Bond responds once Craig leaves. Whatever reason sequels fail, we’ll have plenty of more data points in 2017. January alone gives us Underworld: Blood War, Resident Evil: The Final Chapter, and xXx: The Return of Xander Cage Extreme sports! That was a thing once!
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