A-List: Worst Sequels Ever
By Josh Spiegel
July 29, 2010
BoxOfficeProphets.com
The last film of those three got me thinking about the worst sequels ever. I’ve already done an A-List, almost a year ago, about the most unnecessary sequels ever made, but none of the movies on this list are on that one. A few of them are equally unnecessary, but they stand out as being just awful, some of the worst movies ever brought down the Hollywood system. Cats and Dogs: The Revenge of Kitty Galore could be a good movie, but who am I kidding? I’ve got no interest, I’m not likely to see it (maybe it’s because I’m inherently a cat person and don’t like when they’re always vilified in pop culture), and it’s probably not going to stand next to Toy Story 2 & 3, and The Godfather, Part II as one of the best sequels ever. Will it become one of the worst? Let’s get to the A-List and find out its competitors.
Star Wars: Episode II – Attack of the Clones
I’ve harbored plenty of vitriol in past A-Lists for the Star Wars prequel, but it’s the second film of the new trilogy, released in May 2002, that draws the most ire. Though Jake Lloyd, as the young Anakin from The Phantom Menace, was a uniquely untalented performer, Hayden Christensen did the unthinkable and be even worse. Attack of the Clones is ostensibly the most romantic film of the series, as we get to see exactly how Anakin Skywalker and Queen Amidala fall in love so they’ll one day have kids named Luke and Leia. So why is Attack of the Clones a terrible sequel? First of all, as unlikely as it is, I’m not sure I want to know how Anakin and Amidala fall in love. They’re attractive, around the same age (though they seem much closer now than in Phantom Menace), and there’s no one else around. That should be it.
What’s worse is that George Lucas decided to take it upon himself (with some help from fellow screenwriter Jonathan Hales) to write some of the worst dialogue ever. “I don’t like sand. It’s coarse and rough and irritating and it gets everywhere. Not like here. Here everything is soft and smooth.” Pick up your jaws from the floor, readers. That’s a real line of dialogue from a modern motion picture. All the money was spent on special effects; none was wasted on making sure the actors said things that made something close to sense. It’s a familiar complaint these days, but rarely do such huge movies fail so miserably at selling the human relationships that occur while explosions go on in the background. The prequel trilogy is misbegotten, but Attack of the Clones is worst of all.
Blues Brothers 2000
If ever there was a movie that did not need to be made, it’s Blues Brothers 2000. Most sequels, granted, are unnecessary; the stories usually are complete by the end of the first film, but sometimes there are outliers. Blues Brothers 2000 is not one of those outliers. What could stop a sequel to The Blues Brothers from getting made? Well, the gap in time between the two films is 18 years. One of the lead actors had passed away over a decade ago. The first film was successful, but obviously not so much as to have audiences begging for a return to the characters. Finally, though the characters were originally from Saturday Night Live, the audiences who watched the show in the late-1990s weren’t nearly the types to immediately know who Jake and Elwood Blues were. So that a sequel was made is shocking. That it sucks is unsurprising.
John Landis and Dan Aykroyd returned for Blues Brothers 2000. In place of the late John Belushi, John Goodman took the reins as Mighty Mack, a bartender with a gifted voice. Though Goodman isn’t half-bad as a singer, he’s just not John Belushi. He’s a great actor, but….why would anyone even want to replace Jake Blues? The movie was made with good intentions, which is usually what makes a bad movie even worse. The musical performances, from greats such as Aretha Franklin, James Brown, B.B. King, and Bo Diddley, are a lot of fun, but they’re also completely separate from the movie, which also adds a kid Blues Brother into the mix. There are insane car chases, deadpan humor, silly cameos, and everything else that made The Blues Brothers a comedy classic. But there’s no feeling involved, aside from that of wanting to make money.
Scary Movie 2
These days, a lot of ire is appropriately aimed at Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer for the horrors they’ve unleashed upon America, including Date Movie, Epic Movie, and Meet the Spartans. These are among the worst studio films ever created, but they got their start with Scary Movie, a 2000 comedy hit that mercilessly mocked horror movies. What happened after Scary Movie is one of the worst movies ever made, let alone of the worst sequels ever. Scary Movie 2 combines the worst elements of its predecessor with tons of motifs that would pop up in the Friedberg/Seltzer films: quickly dated humor, drawn-out running gags, and “celebrity” cameos. Scary Movie 2 features James Woods, David Cross, Chris Elliott, and Andy Richter; the movie still manages to be terrible.
A good sign of a bad movie is when it feels like it has to work to get to the finish line. When a movie is 83 minutes long, including the credits, it shouldn’t feel twice as long. But all the parodies - including an interminable parody of a flashy sports commercial - dilute whatever humor there might have been. What’s more, Scary Movie 2 came less than a year after its predecessor. What horror-movie tropes could there still be to parody? Sure, there’s the potential for making fun of horror-movie sequels, but this story, mainly set in a haunted house, goes nowhere. When you waste the talents of the people I mentioned above - Cross gets to sit in a wheelchair and make dumb faces - it’s painful. When you squander goodwill within a year, it’s embarrassing.
Batman and Robin
Arnold Schwarzenegger would become the governor of California a few years later. Alicia Silverstone and Chris O’Donnell would wind up fading away from movies. Uma Thurman would go on to kill Bill. And George Clooney would do something even more impossible: become the most famous movie star of his generation. How is it impossible to do such a thing? When you start out with movies like Batman and Robin, the road to success becomes so steep, it’s like walking up a wall. Clooney has been very public about how bad he thinks the movie is, and he’s absolutely right. Perform a painful trick: watch either Batman Begins or The Dark Knight, and then watch either Batman Forever or Batman and Robin. Try not to cringe for the entire two hours. I dare you.
So what goes wrong here? Well, unlike the 21st-century incarnation of Batman (and the animated version from the 1990s onward), this film is all about merchandise. There’s a credit card joke within the first five minutes, and…well, isn’t that enough? There is a CREDIT CARD JOKE in a Batman movie. When I think of how cheesy, how campy, how irretrievably silly these movies are, I genuinely wonder how the Adam West version of Batman ever became successful. Was being campy enough? One of the actual pleasures of the movie is listening to Schwarzenegger’s Mr. Freeze. His one-liners are the stuff of bad-movie legend. I’ll leave you with my favorite from this horrendous near-franchise-killing sequel: “Let’s kick some ice!” Oh, and “The Ice Man cometh!” Oh, and “Tonight’s forecast: a freeze is coming!” Oh, and…
Speed 2: Cruise Control
Making a sequel to Speed seems logical. If Die Hard was an action movie contained to a skyscraper, and its sequels could survive by expanding the setting, why couldn’t the same work for a sequel to Speed, an action movie mostly contained to a speeding bus? The same should have worked, but it failed. The first problem was that Speed’s lead actor, Keanu Reeves, chose not to return. The second was that the film’s screenwriter, Graham Yost, had nothing to do with the sequel, set mostly on a cruise ship taken over by a madman. The third is that the villain wasn’t nearly as charming, charismatic, or frightening as Dennis Hopper was. Willem Dafoe, as the hijacker, isn’t a bad actor, but when you’re saddled with playing a guy whose creepiness is defined by the medical malady that requires he put leeches on his body regularly, the challenge is a bit too great.
Sandra Bullock returned here, and did her able best (and even though I’ve admitted I’m not a fan, I do mean that genuinely). Instead of Reeves, Jason Patric took the role of the stoic lead, another cop who Bullock’s character falls in love with. The attempts at humor fall flat, the action sequences are mostly bland and unexciting, and the stakes are lower. Why? Partly, the stakes are lower because the setting is so much wider. When you are on a ticking time bomb that’s a relatively claustrophobic setting with only a few other people, things can get tense. When the ticking time bomb is a behemoth of a cruise ship, the same can’t be said. Die Hard proved that the action movie could be reinvented, and by keeping its star, the series became iconic. Speed was clearly lightning in a bottle, and the people behind the sequel couldn’t capture it twice.