The truly great movies out there are great for a reason. There were fresh ideas brought to the table that were simply unforgettable. Scenes that had never been done before and took the audience by surprise. Scenes that are unforgettable. The chest-bursting in Alien, the head rotation in The Exorcist, the freak gasoline fight accident in Zoolander, John McClane’s being forced to run barefoot across glass in Die Hard, Cameron Diaz’s very particular brand of hair gel in There’s Something About Mary, these moments can’t be shaken. However, a single scene isn’t necessarily enough to keep an entire film in the memory. The viewer has to be hooked all the way through, and that’s done with an energetic script that plays as organic and a roster of other factors.
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But these following movies? There’s just nothing there that makes them stick in your mind a year later. You may very well have forgotten most if not all of their events a single day later. We’re not strictly saying they’re “bad” movies, though some of them are, as much as we’re saying they just come and go and you’d be hard-pressed to remember a single scene.
10) The Irishman
The Irishman is the one entry on this list that warrants a bit of an asterisk. Specifically, it’s incredibly forgettable for a Martin Scorsese movie. It’s certainly better than Robert De Niro and Al Pacino’s previous collaboration, Righteous Kill.
But even still, it’s the clout behind The Irishman that makes its bland averageness all the more heartbreaking. The movie is three and a half hours long and it’s very difficult to think of one scene that stands above any other. We remember that De Niro and Pacino share a few memorable dinner and hotel room conversations, but what those conversations were about is anyone’s guess. Contrast that with their diner conversation in Heat. You could go thirty years without watching that movie and still remember the exact tone of the face-to-face.
Stream The Irishman on Netflix.
9) Gangster Squad
If the tragic Aurora, Colorado The Dark Knight Rises shooting hadn’t occurred, we would have gotten the original movie theater-set ending of Gangster Squad. That undoubtedly would have been more memorable than the ending we got, which has a bunch of vases shattering in slow-motion as bullets pass through them in a hotel lobby, but it still would have been too little too late in terms of making a film that sticks in the minds of the viewer.
There’s just nothing in Gangster Squad that hasn’t been done better elsewhere. There are no characters with any depth, no action sequences that pack a punch (they feel more cartoonish than anything else), and no performance that makes one believe the actor thinks they’re in a good movie. You might have a drop or two of fun while watching it, but you’ll forget it as soon as the credits begin.
8) The Dark Tower
Stephen King’s The Dark Tower books build a massive, vibrantly realized world that the reader has a blast imagining just as the author sees it. The Dark Tower movie is a narratively incoherent actioner with no ambition.
It genuinely never captures the spirit of King’s books. It reeks of behind-the-scenes tampering as it lunges from one shoddily staged and unconvincingly acted scene to the next. In the pantheon of King adaptations, The Dark Tower is the least memorable.
Stream The Dark Tower for free with ads on Prime Video.
7) Need for Speed
Need for Speed is the Fast & Furious franchise if it didn’t have any of that saga’s excess or slightly cartoonish but lovable tone. It’s a cash grab, plain and simple.
The same criticism applies to Gran Turismo, but at least that movie had a shred of heart. Need for Speed has none. It’s blatantly trying to be like the Fast & Furious franchise’s small-time criminal-focused first chapter. It isn’t, and it’s only importance is being the movie that started and simultaneously stopped Aaron Paul’s career as a leading man movie star.
Stream Need for Speed for free on Hoopla.
6) A Good Day to Die Hard
Even including Live Free or Die Hard, every member of the John McClane franchise has a memorable villain. At least compared to A Good Day to Die Hard. We spend half the movie believing Yuri Komarov is a political prisoner only to be revealed as a villain. And, while that’s a big plot development, it will absolutely be forgotten because he’s not written as remotely interesting.
Worse yet, the same could be said of John McClane. All of the smirking, winking charm is gone, replaced with a paper-thing action hero type who just bickers with his son all throughout. The spirit of the Die Hard franchise is entirely absent in the fifth and final installment, so much so that it doesn’t even feel like an installment of the IP. Even Live Free or Die Hard pulled that off here and there.
Stream A Good Day to Die Hard on Hulu.
5) Transformers: The Last Knight
All of the Transformers movies have a way of blending into one another, because they’re essentially the same thing repeated with new lore expansions added each time. But the nonsensical and dreadfully long Transformers: The Last Knight is the worst offender.
There’s running on fumes and then there’s running with a spent tank. The Last Knight is the latter. It’s two and a half hours of bored performances, cluttered plotting that we know will just double back on itself by film’s end (it’s not as if Optimus was going to stay evil), and CGI that had somehow gotten worse 10 years after the original movie.
Stream Transformers: The Last Knight on MGM+.
4) Mile 22
Mark Wahlberg has several forgettable movies under his belt. Rock Star, May Payne, Date Night, Contraband, Broken City, the aforementioned The Last Knight, none of these movies have anything that stays with you. But Mile 22 is the greatest offender of them all (Broken City sure does nip at its yawn-inducing heels, though).
Mile 22 is so chaotic and choppy that you aren’t going to remember any of its action sequences, and action sequences seem to be the only thing it cares about. It says a lot about a screenplay if John Malkovich and Lauren Cohan (forever underutilized on the big screen) can’t imbue their characters with an ounce of life.
Stream Mile 22 on TNT.
3) Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit
The writing was on the wall pretty early on for Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit. After all, it was a member of a recognizable IP with some real heavy hitters on the cast list. Chris Pine, Kevin Costner, and Keira Knightley are all huge stars, as is Kenneth Branagh. And, speaking of Branagh, this was his directorial follow-up to Thor. And yet, even with all those factors, it was dumped into theaters in January.
January isn’t universally the “dumping ground” month, but it’s primarily known for a few things, most notably a horror movie or two and a relatively big project the studio has already funneled money into that it knows will tank hard if facing summer movie season competition. This is fully applicable to Jack Ryan, who got a far more successful reboot on Prime Video four years later.
Stream Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit on Paramount+.
2) The Words
The Words is a romance without much passion, a drama without any believable big emotive moments, and a mystery without any compelling questions or answers. There’s a reason why its two directors basically haven’t been heard from since.
It’s amazing how much A-list talent they got together for the most nothing drama of all time. Bradley Cooper, Jeremy Irons, Zoe Saldaña, J. K. Simmons, Ben Barnes, Olivia Wilder, Dennis Quaid, those aren’t small names, and none of them are given anything remotely interesting to do.
Stream The Words on Paramount+.
1) The Hangover Part III
There’s one memorable part in The Hangover Part III, and it’s for not-so-great reasons. It also occurs within the first five minutes, so you then have another hour and 35 minutes of nothing to sit through before the credits mercifully roll. That would be the giraffe decapitation, which is a mean-spirited and idiotic way to get the plot going.
People ripped on The Hangover Part II for being a soulless rehash, but it was a treasure compared to the basically plotless Part III, which breaks its back trying to tie into the first film. Speaking of the original, Part II was a black comedy remake of the 2009 classic; Part III is the most purposeless cash grab in comedy cinema history. Neither is required viewing, but there’s genuinely no point in watching round three.
Stream The Hangover Part III on TNT.
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