DAREDEVIL
The 2003 Daredevil movie starred Ben Affleck, Jennifer Garner, Colin Farrell and the late Michael Clarke Duncan, and was pretty much brutalised by critics. I'll agree that it had pacing issues and misguided casting (Garner should never have been Elektra), but it's far from being as bad as some might have you think. The effects have dated hugely already, but it remains a film which could have been amazing with a tighter edit and a few small changes.
ELEKTRA
Daredevil's sort-of-sequel saw Jennifer Garner's Elektra return from the dead (in a bad wig) and change into something more like the character we know and love from the comics. Sadly, the film is awful apart from the first ten minutes and the last ten minutes, which are the parts where Elektra wears the famous red costume and kicks the most behind. Chop the middle hour out of it, and it'd improve massively.
SUPERMAN RETURNS
Otherwise known as “The Superman film in which ABSOLUTELY NOTHING HAPPENS”, Bryan Singer's strangely flat and tedious film lacks all of the things that a Supes film should have in it, apart from the great opening titles and Brandon Routh's splendid take on the Christopher Reeve incarnation. Aside from the plane scene, there is nothing in this film that warrants another viewing.
X-MEN: THE LAST STAND
Bryan Singer had quit X3 to go and make the Superman yawn-fest, leaving Brett Ratner to do his best with the third film. The trailers showed a huge amount of promise, and while the film isn't nearly as bad as many people claim, it's a lousy follow-up to the perfection that was X-Men 2. The tease of the Sentinels was such a cop-out, too.
BATMAN AND ROBIN
Nipples. NIPPLES ON BATMAN, DAMMIT. Nipples, silver and blue costumes, Mr Freeze's slippers, Uma Thurman's rubbish costume, Bane reduced to comic relief, a script written entirely on the back of a crisp packet and Joel Schumacher viciously taking the franchise from behind. Get out of my sight. Strangely though, BATMAN FOREVER, the one he did before this, wasn't nearly as bad.
SPIDER-MAN 3
The final Sam Raimi/Tobey Maguire Spidey film saw Sandman as the main villain and a shoehorned Venom plot wrestling for space, along with both Mary Jane and Gwen Stacey in the same script. Oh, and emo Spidey. It was fun to see the black costume onscreen, but the symbiont and Venom plot should have been the main story, or not in it at all (Raimi didn't want him in there, but the studio insisted). The Sandman effects were beautiful, but it all came across as a little half-hearted.
GHOST RIDER
Nicholas Cage as Johnny Blaze? The Ghost Rider movies jut about work, but only just. The sequel was certainly better than this one, which was oddly paced, the bad guys looked aaaalllll wrong and it all felt a bit forced. It was decent popcorn material, but a long way from the glorious explosion of supernatural violence that it could have been.
HOWARD THE DUCK
There's a sex scene between Lea Thompson and a rubber-faced alien duck in it. Need I say more?
BARB WIRE
“Don't call me babe!” yelled the posters and the trailers. They should have said “Don't call me for any more acting work ever again”. Pamela Anderson's turn as the Dark Horse Comics badass had some fun action scenes in it, but sod all in terms of substance. Mind you, substance isn't something most Pamela Anderson fans were interested in at the time...
CATWOMAN
There is no redeeming feature about this film whatsoever. Halle Berry was miscast. The script is agonizingly bad. The costume was hideous. Everything about it goes against the foundations of the Catwoman character and the comics which spawned her. As I said at the start, I can usually find entertainment in anything at all. Not this. This was torture, plain and simple. Let's pretend this never even existed. Let's pretend Catwoman went straight from Michelle Pfeiffer to Anne Hathaway, and hope that Warners get off their backsides and start using the MASSIVE amount of amazing content they have at their disposal for something far better.
I feel all dirty now. I might go and stick X2 on to remind myself just how amazing comic movies can be when the makers pay attention and have some respect for the source material.
