BOMBS AWAY!
50 Terrible Movies by Great Directors
Cinematic disasters Hollywood's greatest geniuses would love to forget — starring Martin Scorsese, Clint Eastwood, David Fincher, and more
BY ANDY GREENE
MARCH 26, 2024
Photo Illustration by Joe Rodriguez. Paramount/Everett Collection, 9; Universal Pictures/Everett Collection, 5; Buena Vista Pictures/Everett collection, 4.
PHOTO ILLUSTRATION BY JOE RODRIGUEZ. PARAMOUNT/EVERETT COLLECTION, 9; UNIVERSAL PICTURES/EVERETT COLLECTION, 5; BUENA VISTA PICTURES/EVERETT COLLECTION, 4.
SHOW US A director who never created at least one genuine turkey of a movie, and we’ll show you a director with an extremely short career. There’s simply too many things that can go wrong once a movie goes into production: The budget can get slashed, filming might start before the script is finalized, key actors could drop out, and the studio could meddle in all sorts of irksome ways.
That’s why titans of cinema like Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, Steven Spielgerg, James Cameron, and Ridley Scott all have at least one movie they wish they could erase from their IMDB page. Some of them were made when they were young novices without any real ability to say no. Some of them were made at the peak of their powers when they made horrid bad decisions out of greed, hubris, or temporary insanity. And many were shot in the waning days of their careers when getting a green light for any project was difficult.
With all this in mind, we assembled this list of 50 truly terrible movies by otherwise brilliant directors. We know some of these will be controversial choices. There are folks out there that truly love Alien 3, Star Wars Episode One: The Phantom Menace, and Jupiter Ascending. One moviegoer’s disaster is another moviegoer’s cult classic. But we don’t think there are many hardcore Jack, North, or Wild, Wild West fans out there. These are terrible, terrible movies. If we gave truth serum to Francis Ford Coppola, Rob Reiner, and Barry Sonnenfeld, they’d all likely agree.
50
‘Renaissance Man’ (Penny Marshall)
In the period between 1988 and 1992, Penny Marshall gifted the world with Big, Awakenings, and A League of Their Own. She could have followed that trio up with virtually any movie she wanted since they were all enormous critical and commercial hits. Sadly, Marshall’s next project was Renaissance Man. It’s a dim-witted comedy about an unemployed ad executive (Danny DeVito) who finds himself teaching cadets on a military training base. They don’t know much about Shakespeare. He doesn’t know much about the military. They learn from each other in an endless series of sitcom cliches. A young Mark Wahlberg raps about Hamlet. All of this is as horrible as you can imagine. “Watching it, I felt embarrassed for the actors, who are asked to inhabit scenes so contrived and artificial that no possible skill could bring them to life,” Roger Ebert wrote. “It’s hard to believe that this is the work of Penny Marshall, whose films like Big and A League of Their Own seemed filled with a breezy confidence.”
49
‘The Fountain’ (Darren Aronofsky)
WARNER BROS.
It’s slightly unfair to trash The Fountain since the final version is so wildly far off from what director Darren Aronofsky had in mind when work on the film began. The original plan was to place Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett in the lead roles of a $70 million film. When the budget was sliced down to $35 million with Hugh Jackman and Rachel Weisz as the stars, Aronofsky had to make some drastic cuts that severely compromised his vision. But we can only judge what wound up on the screen, and that’s a film where Jackman plays a Spanish conquistador searching for an eternal life elixir, a modern-day scientist trying to cure his wife’s brain disease, and a 26th-century man traveling through space with a tree. Critics were polarized by the film, but most viewers were simply baffled and bored. “I will concede the film is not a great success,” wrote Roger Ebert. “And yet I believe we have not seen the real film. When a $75 million production goes into turnaround and is made for $35 million, elements get eliminated. When a film telling three stories and spanning thousands of years has a running time of 96 minutes, scenes must have been cut out. There will someday be a director’s cut of this movie, and that’s the cut I want to see.”
48
‘How Do You Know’ (James L. Brooks)
Reese Witherspoon and Paul Rudd star in Columbia Pictures' "How Do You Know," also starring Owen Wilson and Jack Nicholson.
DAVID JAMES
James L. Brooks spent so much time in television working on shows like The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Taxi, and The Simpsons that he’s only directed six movies. The best of the bunch (Terms of Endearment, Broadcast News, As Good As It Gets) are master classes in storytelling. The middling ones (I’ll Do Anything, Spanglish) reveal his limitations as a writer-director, but they’re still worth watching if you come across them on basic cable. And then there’s his 2010 romantic comedy How Do You Know. It has a wonderful cast led by Reese Witherspoon, Paul Rudd, Owen Wilson, and Jack Nicholson in his final film role to date. Witherspoon plays a softball player torn between a cocky baseball player (Wilson) and a charming businessman (Rudd). “Nothing heats up,” Roger Ebert wrote. “The movie doesn’t lead us, it simply stays in step.” It’s a real bummer that Nicholson ended his career on this deeply forgettable rom-com. For a long time, it seemed like it might be the last Brooks movie as well. But he’s assembled Jamie Lee Curtis, Woody Harrelson, Ayo Edebiri, Albert Brooks, Kumail Nanjiani, and Spike Fearn for an upcoming movie he’s calling Ella McCay. Let’s hope it closer in spirit to Terms of Endearment and As Good As It Gets than How Do You Know. That one almost single handedly killed the rom-com.
47
‘The Truth About Charlie’ (Jonathan Demme)
Mark Wahlberg and Thandie Newton in "The Truth About Charlie"
KEN REGAN/CAMERA 5/©2002 UNIVERSAL STUDIOS.
Remaking a classic movie is always a very risky proposition. There’s always the chance you’ll pull off a miracle like The Birdcage, A Star Is Born, True Grit, or Oceans 11. But odds are much greater you’ll fall way short of the original and get filleted by the critics. The Truth About Charlie is an excellent example. The 2002 Jonthan Demme mystery is a remake of the 1963 Cary Grant/Audrey Hepburn film Charade. It centers around a woman who discovers her husband is dead, millions of dollars are missing, and all sorts of unsavory characters are after her for it. Demme cast Mark Walhberg in the thankless position of replacing Grant. (This is just one year after Wahlberg’s Planet of the Apes fiasco). Thandie Newton did a much better job with the Hepburn part, but there’s no earthly reason for this movie to exist. The original is better in every conceivable way. It earned a paltry $7.1 million on a $60 million budget, and it was the second bomb in a row for Demme after Beloved. But Beloved was a noble failure. The Truth About Charlie was just a regular failure. Demme soldiered on by remaking The Manchurian Candidate as his next movie. But by casting Denzel Washington and Meryl Streep — and not Marky Mark — he actually pulled it off.
46
‘Look Who’s Talking Too’ (Amy Heckerling)
LOOK WHO'S TALKING TOO, John Travolta, 1990. ©TriStar Pictures/courtesy Everett Collection
©TRISTAR PICTURES/ EVERETT COLLECTION
The original Look Who’s Talking isn’t a bad movie. And when you compare it with every other movie about a talking baby in Hollywood history, it’s basically Citizen Kane. The third movie in the series, Look Who’s Talking Now, frequently appears on lists of the worst movies ever made. That’s the one where the dogs talk. But original Look Who’s Talking director Amy Heckerling didn’t have any involvement with that one. Sadly, she co-wrote and directed 1990’s Look Who’s Talking Too. This quickie sequel came just one year after the original, and it reunites Kirstie Alley, John Travolta, and Bruce Willis as the voice of baby Mikey. Roseanne Barr joined the team this time as the voice of his new baby sister. (Mikey can talk at this point like any toddler, but he somehow still has very adult thoughts. Will the Willis voice ever leave his head? Was he haunted by it forever? Is he in a mental asylum somewhere now?) The original movie was about a single woman trying to keep her job and deal with the responsibilities of motherhood. The sequel is nothing but dumb sitcom hijinks. Five years later, Hecklering wrote and directed Clueless. All was forgiven.
45
‘Bicentennial Man’ (Christopher Columbus)
COLUMBIA PICTURES/TOUCHSTONE PICTURES
Christopher Columbus has an incredible ability to create comedies that bring tears at unexpected moments. This is true for Mrs. Doubtfire, Stepmom, and even the first two Home Alone movies. (There’s a reason the original reduces George Costanza to a sobbing mess on Seinfeld.) But the formula didn’t work on 1999’s Bicentennial Man, where Robin Williams plays a robot that lives for over 200 years. It’s based on the 1976 Isaac Asimov novelette The Bicentennial Man, but it’s a painfully sappy adaptation where Williams is forced to confront the fact that everyone he loves will eventually die. Much has been written about the brilliant movies of 1999, but nobody cites this one as an example. Fortunately, the fiasco had little impact on Columbus’ career. His next movie was an adaptation of a children’s book about a British boy who learns he’s a wizard on his 11th birthday. That one worked quite well.
44
‘Basic’ (John McTiernan)
BASIC, Dash Mihok, Samuel L. Jackson, 2003, (c) Columbia/courtesy Everett Collection
©COLUMBIA PICTURES/ EVERETT COLLECTION
John McTiernan may not be as well known as many other directors on this list, but he’s the man behind Predator, The Hunt for Red October, Die Hard, and the criminally underrated Die Hard With a Vengeance. In other words, he made the two good Die Hards. He had no involvement with the three shitty ones. (And yes, Die Hard 2 is better than four and five. It still sucks.) If he just made the original Die Hard, he’d deserve a lifetime achievement award at the Oscars. His career took a hit in 1993 when he directed Last Action Hero (which isn’t as bad as legend suggests), and nosedived in 1999 when The 13th Warrior bombed hard. But he bottomed out in 2003 with Basic, an action thriller that reunited the Pulp Fiction team of John Travolta and Samuel J. Jackson. The convoluted plot centers around a DEA agent trying to figure out why an Army Ranger drill sergeant disappeared during a training exercise. There’s a twist ending that’s as stupid as it is implausible. Simply put, it’s the least enjoyable Pulp Fiction reunion you could possibly imagine. It’s been over 20 years since Basic tanked, and McTiernan has yet to direct another movie. (This is largely due to his involvement in the Anthony Pellicano wiretapping scandal, which ultimately sent him to prison for a year in 2013. But that’s a whole other story.)
43
‘Assassins’ (Richard Donner)
ASSASSINS, Sylvester Stallone, Antonio Banderas, 1995.
©WARNER BROS/ EVERETT COLLECTION
As the movies have shown us over and over again, it’s not easy to retire when you’re a professional assassin. There’s always some nefarious force from your past that strong-arms you into taking one last job. That’s the cliched plot of Richard Donner’s 1995 movie Assassins, starring Sylvester Stallone and Antonio Banderas. This was a few years past the point where Stallone’s name on a poster meant any movie would be an automatic hit, and a few years past the point where Donner churned out stunning movies like The Goonies, Scrooged, Superman, and Lethal Weapon 2 (it’s better than the first) at a remarkable clip. Assassins doesn’t have any of that Lethal Weapon magic. It’s just a turgid action flick that felt like a relic of an earlier time. It was also a huge commercial and critical disappointment that Donner never quite recovered from despite finding moderate success a couple of years later with Mel Gibson’s Conspiracy Theory.
42
‘Girl 6’ (Spike Lee)
GIRL 6, Theresa Randle, 1996. ©20th Century-Fox Film Corporation, TM & Copyright/courtesy Everett Collection
20TH CENTURY FOX LICENSING/ EVERETT COLLECTION
Spike Lee wrote the first eight movies he directed, including Do the Right Thing, Jungle Fever, Crooklyn, and Malcolm X. But in 1996, he decided to adapt a screenplay by Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Suzan-Lori Parks for the screen. Girl 6 is about a struggling actress who finds work as a phone-sex operator. The work takes a toll on her personal life and mental health before she walks away from it. It’s an interesting premise for a movie, but virtually nothing about it works. “Girl 6 is Spike Lee’s least successful film,” Roger Ebert wrote, “and the problem is twofold: He doesn’t really know and understand Girl 6, and he has no clear idea of the film’s structure and purpose. If he’d been able to fix the second problem, he might have been able to paper over the first one. Strongly told stories have a way of carrying their characters along with them. But here we have an undefined character in an aimless story. Too bad.”
41
‘The Good German’ (Steven Soderbergh)
CATE BLANCHETT stars as Lena Brandt and GEORGE CLOONEY stars as Jake Geismer in Warner Bros. Pictures' and Virtual Studios' dramatic thriller "The Good German," distributed by Warner Bros. Pictures. The film also stars Tobey Maguire...PHOTOGRAPHS TO BE USED SOLELY FOR ADVERTISING, PROMOTION, PUBLICITY OR REVIEWS OF THIS SPECIFIC MOTION PICTURE AND TO REMAIN THE PROPERTY OF THE STUDIO. NOT FOR SALE OR REDISTRIBUTION. ..
MELINDA SUE GORDON/WARNER BROS.
Steven Soderbergh has made just about every kind of movie imaginable. The only thing Solaris, Magic Mike, Erin Brockovich, Oceans 11, Kafka, and Contagion have in common is that he directed them. But he proved that film noir wasn’t his thing in 2006 when he adapted Joseph Kanon’s spy novel The Good German for the big screen. George Clooney, Cate Blanchett, and Tobey Maguire were given lead roles, and Soderbergh made every effort to make this look like an actual film noir from the Forties, down to black-and-white film stock and a poster that paid homage to Casablanca, but the retro play just didn’t work. He spent so much time on the look and feel that the story suffered. “There isn’t a moment in this self-conscious, uninvolving movie when you aren’t aware you are watching an experiment,” Rene Rodriguez wrote in the Miami Herald, “which might make a good lesson for film school students on what not to do.”
40
‘Random Hearts’ (Sydney Pollack)
When Harrison Ford agreed to star in a 1995 remake of Sabrina with Tootsie and Three Days of the Condor director Sydney Pollack, it was a rare misfire for the Hollywood superstar. Ford bounced back in 1997 with Air Force One. But he returned to Pollack two years later for Random Hearts, an adaptation of a 1984 Warren Adler novel about a love affair between a congresswoman and a police officer. They meet when their spouses die in a plane crash. It’s a good book, but a deeply boring movie. “It takes forever for this portentous drama to get to the inevitable moment when the chilly congresswoman melts in the dogged cop’s arms,” wrote Newsweek’s David Ansen, “and when it does, the heat generated by these two attractive stars barely rises above room temperature.”
39
‘Jupiter Ascending’ (The Wachowskis)
©WARNER BROS/ EVERETT COLLECTION
The incredible success of The Matrix and the two sequels gave the Wachowskis a license to basically make whatever movies they wanted. They used it to take on fantastically ambitious movies like Speed Racer, Cloud Atlas, and Jupiter Ascending. When they all failed to achieve anything remotely comparable to Matrix-level dollars, their “do whatever the fuck you want” license was revoked. But Speed Racer and Cloud Atlas have genuine cult followings. They are flawed, but interesting. Jupiter Ascending is just a friggin’ mess. It’s a Mila Kunis/Channing Tatum space opera about a cleaning lady on a futuristic Earth who finds herself on an interplanetary adventure alongside a genetically engineered soldier. Nearly everyone involved in the movie said they knew they were making a turkey the whole time, especially since the budget got chopped in half at the last minute. “It was a nightmare from the jump,” Tatum said in 2022. “It was a sideways movie. All of us were there for seven months, busting our hump. It was just tough.” It was also the last movie the Wachowskis made as a duo. Lana Wachowski followed it up by directing The Matrix Resurrections by herself. It was not a great movie, especially when compared to the original, but it’s better than Jupiter Ascending by absurd degrees.
38
‘Downsizing’ (Alexander Payne)
©PARAMOUNT/EVERETT COLLECTION
As Alexander Payne proved yet again with 2023’s The Holdovers, he’s a master when it comes to mixing comedy with drama. For more evidence of this, look back to Election, About Schmidt, Sideways, and Nebraska. In 2017, though, his instincts failed him when he made Downsizing. In the strong likelihood you forget Downsizing exists, it’s a Matt Damon movie about a man who shrinks his body down to five-inches tall to live in an experimental community with other tiny people. It’s supposed to be a land of bliss, but things go awry very quickly. “It’s the rare movie that seems to execute every part of its concept absolutely wrong,” wrote NPR’s Andrew Lapin, “a narrative, tonal, visual and sociopolitical fiasco the likes of which haven’t been seen in many moons.”
37
‘Garbo Talks’ (Sidney Lumet)
©MGM/EVERETT COLLECTION
Sidney Lumet made his directorial debut in 1957 with 12 Angry Men. Fifty years later, he wrapped up his career with Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead. It was a stunning finale, but he had a handful of misfires along the way. The low point was 1984’s Garbo Talks starring Carrie Fisher, Ann Bancroft, and Ron Silver. It’s about a terminally ill woman who tries to meet reclusive silent-film star Greta Garbo before she dies, drawing a paparazzo and her daughter-in-law into the quest. It’s an intriguing premise, though the payoff is absurdly disappointing. “With a buildup like this, Garbo’s entrance had better be spectacular,” Roger Ebert wrote in a one-star pan. “Unfortunately, it’s not. It’s such an anticlimax that it would have been more effective for the woman to die without ever meeting Garbo.”
36
‘The Ward’ (John Carpenter)
It’s not hard to pick out John Carpenter’s greatest triumphs as a director. They are clearly the original Halloween in 1978, Escape From New York in 1981, and The Thing in 1982. Many detractors point to the 1992 Chevy Chase bomb Memoirs of an Invisible Man or the 2001 sci-fi Western horror mashup Ghosts of Mars as his worst moments, but those fail in ways that are semi-interesting and occasionally somewhat novel. A small cult has grown around Ghosts of Mars since it’s so damn odd. But there’s no cult around the 2010 Amber Heard horror film The Ward. It’s just a rote, drab flick about a woman stuck in a haunted mental ward. “[It] continues the painful decline of a director who seems more nostalgic for past glories than excited about new ideas,” The New York Times’ Jeannette Catsoulis wrote in a pan. “Quaintly old-fashioned in style, plot and special effects, this familiar tale of female derangement and institutional abuse is too tame to scare and too shallow to engage.”
35
‘The Stepford Wives’ (Frank Oz)
Nicole Kidman in "The Stepford Wives"
PARAMOUNT PICTURES/DREAMWORKS
Frank Oz is best known as the puppetmaster behind Yoda, Miss Piggy, Cookie Monster, and Grover. But he’s also a gifted filmmaker who dir
