Movies that don't suck until later in the film?

[Mutara Nebula 1967]

INDEPENDANCE DAY was great but the minute you see the light shatter in the tunnel where Vivica Fox is hiding..the light pretty much goes out for the rest of the movie...nothing can top the city wide destruction scenes...and some of it is even a little dull..

 

[hot4_horsfall]

For me it's Bruce Almighty the first half of that movie was good and the last half was seriously lacking any form of comedy at all.

 

[OdoWanKenobi]

The Island.

The first half is a fascinating sci-fi sotry. The second half is a run of the mill action-fest.

 

[MeanJoePhaser]

Spiderman 3- Once Peter goes on the geek ego trip, then the dancing bit, and if not that part, then when Brock becomes Venom.

Live Free or Die Hard- Kevin Smith appears...movie derails...I still enjoyed the film, but...

 

[Lookingglassman]

I agree with those about Sunshine. This movie started off great, but quickly went down hill. The ending really made no sense. I'm glad I got a free bootleg copy because I would have been upset if I had actually paid to see this.

 

[Wonderlust King]

Spiderman 3 was alright until that goddamn lounge scene. I wanted to bash my brains out on the seat in front of me.

 

[RoJoHen]

The ending to "The Prestige" completely ruins it, IMO. Cloning? Seriously? It took the plausibility right out of the film.

I've heard that opinion before. Personally, I think the film is fantastic and it is one of my favorites.

It was close to being one of my favorites as well, right until the very end with the cloning.

 

[DanTheGrey]

Other than ones already mentioned.

Sideways...I was enjoying myself until about 40% of the way in when I just realized they were just self-absorbed asses that deserved everything that happened to them and my wife and I started drinking to see if it would make the movie more tolerable...it didn't. We honestly couldn't see what was good about the film...

 

[Kail]

"Next" was a pretty good concept and film, until the ending. Made me feel I wasted the two previous hours. A total cop out ending.

 

[Timby]

Blade starts off very well, but its third act is a mess.

The first twenty minutes of Star Trek: First Contact are pretty good, and then it falls into an Aliens-style action flick.

The music documentary Leonard Cohen: I'm Your Man begins by presenting us with a movie that is going to explore the life, inspirations and journeys of Leonard Cohen, interspersed with tribute performances by various artists ... and then becomes 75 percent tribute performances, 15 percent of the tribute artists all saying variations of "Cohen inspired my music and my life," and ten percent Cohen himself. It's one of the most frustrating experiences of a movie completely blue-balling me that I've ever had.

"We somehow embrace the notion that this veil of tears, that it's perfectable, that you're going to get it all straight," Cohen says. "I found that things became a lot easier when I no longer expected to win."

Awesome! Tell us more! Oh, sorry, you get to watch Perla Batalla do "Bird on a Wire," now.

 

[FPAlpha]

007: Die Another Day. I thought the part in the beginning inside korea was great. Once he makes it out of Korea though its just non-stop suck

Die another Day is odd, they start off much "harder" than any Bond film we'd see in years and then...

Exactly.. i was positively surprised to see Bond fuck up, getting tortured and "realistically" dropped by MI5 having to fight the bad guy without money, toys and everything else.

10 minutes after Korea we are back to business as usual.. Brosnan was how i always envisioned Bond visually but man did his Bond movies suck storywise!

 

[Ghel]

If you think that the film ending to "The Prestige" is twisted, try the book! (I liked the endings to both, but they definitely require suspension of disbelief)

AS for BAD endings, we could easily start with anything by Michael Crichton:

Andromeda Strain: A virus is about to kill everyone. . . we can't stop it. . . oh, thank goodness, it mutated into a nonlethal form all on its own. THE END

Sphere: We are at the bottom of the ocean being attacked by something unfathomable, so lets go to the surface and forget about it. .. THE END

Jurassic Park: Park breaks down, power goes out, Dino's attack, heros are cornered. Thank goodness helicopters show up to fly everyone out. THE END.

Note the main theme in all of these films/"plots" is that the heros never actually learn to defeat their adversaries. The heros either run away or the adversaries just stop attacking.

 

[OdoWanKenobi]

Would you seriously have rather had the human defeat the dinosaurs in combat?

 

[Aragorn]

^ Stallone, Schwarzenegger, Li, Van Damme, Lundgren and Norris in... Jurassic Park!

Hand-to-hand dino combat!

As for The Prestige, yeah the cloning is out of nowhere (and the trailers made the movie look like it would be a battle between an illusionist and a magician with real magic powers), but it's a tragedy when you consider how he kills himself at the end of every peformance, and the clone does it the very next time.

 

[Lonemagpie]

^ Stallone, Schwarzenegger, Li, Van Damme, Lundgren and Norris in... Jurassic Park!

Hand-to-hand dino combat!

I wanna see that!

Mind you, I've always wanted to see the Arnie version of Hamlet that they do the fake trailer for in Last Action Hero...

 

[dark angel_707]

28 days later - great until they leave London then goes downhill so quickly

 

[Temis the Vorta]

Would you seriously have rather had the human defeat the dinosaurs in combat?

Ally with the velociraptors and band together to take on the T-Rexes! And afterwards the velociraptors don't eat the humans because ummm...the boss velociraptor falls in love with Jeff Goldblum.

 

[ST-One]

Surprised no one's mentioned the recent Tim Machine. Started off well, great SFX, interesting messing about with time, then it went off to the far future and fell apart.

Actually, going to the far future is the main point of the story (in the book and the first movie also).
I like the new movie but I actually do not like the fact that they gave the time-traveller (he originally isn't named in the book; the first movie calls him George) more motivation for his studies of time than mere scientific curiosity.

 

[ST-One]

LOTR The Return of the King is my especial bête noir. All that gazing at each other and smiling mushily while the orchestra shmaltzes on. Twenty bloody minutes of it.

Would you have prefered the book's ending? THAT would have been a drag...

 

[Thespeckledkiwi]

As much as I hated Transformers...

It started out actually pretty solid and then once Bumblebee arrives, it goes downhill quickly. Too many plot points, tangents and dead-end plot lines that kill the movie.

Pirates of the Carribean 3 is actually the opposite IMO.

Oh and Gladiator! Started out okay but then the actual Gladiatorial scenes killed the movie.