Welcome to Bad Movie Triple Bill’s part five, looking today at 3 films from directors notorious for producing a mixed bag of work. None of these three are outright disasters, but all contain enough cinematic sins to condemn them to this part of The Wasteland. Please do comment if you’d like to disagree or defend any of them.
Plagued by production nightmares and onset tensions, old Mad Mel (Gibson) and the inexperienced puppet director Farhad Safinia managed to piss off so many people that all reviewers made a pact to trash the film in the press even before seeing it! Honestly, it is not nearly as bad as they would have you believe, merely tedious and in dire need of a good edit. Gibson and Penn demonstrate decent work at times, reminding you of their innate talents; and the story is interesting enough as a curious piece of history… but… it isn’t nearly enough to save the film from being largely dull and incoherent on an emotional and human level. Eddie Marsan emerges with most respect and dignity intact. Worth a watch, but probably not a second one. An unfortunate failure that has already regained a small cult following, judged on its very generous rating of 7.3 on IMDb.
Decinemal Rating: 64
An OK idea that should have stayed an idea really. The joke is thin and the romance at the real heart of Ruchard Curtis’ light comedy is utterly forgettable. Apart from the magical About Time I find much of Curtis’ work makes me cringe and want to hide behind a cushion, especially any time f**king Ed Sheeran appears on screen and opens his mouth in any way. Despite some nicely conceived moments and set pieces, so many of the jokes fell flat and the pacing was rotten – to the point where I just didn’t care and wanted it all to end ASAP. Not something I would recommend to anyone in a hurry, unless 2 hours of largely inoffensive white noise is what you are looking for.
Decinemal Rating: 62
I really wanted this to be much better than it is. But the trouble with dear old Ken Brannagh is that he is often a f**king awful director. He wants to do too much and ends up losing the focus in any way. Here there are nods to the traditional style of Poirot, but far too many quirky additions that do not make sense or make anyone laugh. Misjudged rather than bad, you find yourself switching off from the drama about half way through. Which for an Agatha Christie mystery is an unforgivable sin – the source material has done the work already, so just tell the story and don’t mess with it. However, the Stella cast have almost no chemistry together, and only the lush production design and some very pretty costumes can save it at all from being a risible dirge of a film. I don’t know… maybe I was in a bad mood when seeing this and I missed the vibe, but either way, it isn’t great.
Decinemal Rating: 61
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