Thursday, June 7, 2012

2003 Movies Ranked




20. Bulletproof Monk
D: Paul Hunter
**********
A mediocre movie with an awesome title and some good moments of action.  Offensively, the movie asserts that people running Holocaust remembrance museums are secretly Nazis!


19. S.W.A.T.
D: Clark Johnson
**********
A forgettable action movie.


18. Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle
D: McG
**********
A terrible and grotesquely overstylized action movie only worth watching for The Thin Man (Crispin Glover).  It also plays a pretty good song at one point.

17. Lost in Translation
D: Sofia Coppola
**********
This movie isn’t really bad, it’s just very boring and overrated.  I probably would have liked it more if it was a short film, but it had too much wordless, pointless filler.  I also would have been less disappointed if people had not gone around pretending it was a comedy when in reality it was a drama with some very, very mild comic relief.


D: Len Wiseman
**********
A waste of a good premise and visuals.  The characters, with the possible exception of Lucian, were not compelling and the design for the “werewolves” was terrible.


15. Daredevil
D: Mark Steven Johnson
**********
Though visually stylish, it’s pretty much a low-quality rip-off of Batman (1989).


14. Bad Boys II
D: Michael Bay
**********
The movie has some good action (including an excellent car chase scene), but its vulgar sense of humor brings it down.  I might have been more prepared for the awfulness of “Transformers” if I had watched this movie beforehand.

13. Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines
D: Jonathan Mostow
**********
Its great action and funny comic relief makes it like a good parody of T2, but it’s a bastardization of that great movie that retcons its optimistic, life-affirming ending for the sake of cynical profit.


12. The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King
D: Peter Jackson
**********
Has plenty of good moments, but its badly paced plot and overreliance on CGI prevents it from being truly great like the previous two entries in the series.


11. Old School
D: Todd Phillips
**********
Despite my the problems I have with the story, it’s still a funny movie.


10. Holes
D: Andrew Davis
**********


9. Shattered Glass
D: Billy Ray
**********
Hayden Christensen is an underrated actor who gets way too much crap for his appearance in the Star Wars prequels, whose shortcomings weren’t even his fault.  This movie is a solid account of the Stephen Glass scandal.  Peter Skarsgard is terrific.


8. Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl
D: Gore Verbinski
**********
A fun, lighthearted swashbuckler with an excellent score.  Johnny Depp’s Jack Sparrow may be a great character, but it’s annoying how Depp now only seems interested in playing him over and over. 

7. Kill Bill: Vol. 1
D: Quentin Tarantino
**********
A stylish and fun martial arts flick with a great sense of wit.  My only problem is that you don’t know when Tarantion is making new action moves up or whether he’s just ripping off choreography from some obscure be movie.


6. The Matrix Reloaded
D: The Wachowski Bros.
**********
Even though the protagonists aren’t very likable and there’s next to no pacing, the visual style and action of this movie are amazing.


5. Once Upon a Time in Mexico
D: Robert Rodriguez
**********
Overall, it's much more fun than Desperado, especially with Johnny Depp's character.


4. Big Fish
D: Tim Burton
**********
A good story about a son coming to terms with his father.  Arguably Burton’s last truly great film before he and Johnny Depp slipped into a downward spiral of self-parody.


3. The Matrix Revolutions
D: The Wachowski Bros.
**********
Despite having some awful dialogue, this movie has a well-placed story that increases the suspense and some excellent action scenes.  The Super Brawl is one of the most epic fights in movie history.


2. X2: X-Men United
D: Bryan Signer
**********
Though I didn’t like the first movie, this one is actually quite solid, and does an impressive job of putting an expanded cast in a coherent story.  I don't care for the title, though (how were the X-Men not united in the last movie?).


1. Goodbye, Lenin!
D: Wolfgang Becker
**********
A funny and poignant German film that went under most Americans’ radar while they were fawning over the bafflingly popular Lost in Translation.



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