Is it worse to be a bad movie from start to finish, or to sandwich one or two scenes displaying something approaching genuine brilliance in amongst an overwhelming sea of mediocrity? To be fair, “neither” would be the preferable answer and then everyone gets to go home happy, but not every feature film gets to be so lucky as to enjoy widespread acclaim.
Plenty of all-time stinkers have showed flashes of greatness before reverting to type, with the debate now shifting over to the forums of Reddit, as film fans single out the solitary isolated scenes that left them massively impressed in spite of everything else that unfolded onscreen between the first shot and the screen fading to black. Fittingly, one of Disney’s most forgettable efforts was the one to get the ball rolling.
The opening scene of mildly successful but completely forgettable supernatural chiller Ghost Ship deserves to be mentioned, after it set the stage for a nail-biting exercise in terror that simply never came. Similarly, the showstopping showdown between Optimus Prime and Megatron in Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen was a thrilling cinematic recreation of smashing your action figures together, but Michael Bay’s entire five-film stint at the helm of the franchise failed to recapture that rush again.
Superman Returns‘ airborne rescue is without a doubt one of the best superhero action sequences you’ll ever see, but the rest of the elegiac reboot was severely underwhelming. Gods and Titans doing slickly stylish battle in the mediocre Immortals, the ending of Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines, and the phenomenal prologue of X-Men Origins: Wolverine really leave you wishing the brains behind them had managed to maintain that quality for two hours, instead of a few measly minutes.