Wolverine’ 10 Movies With Great Plots but Terrible Execution
Good storylines are an essential part of any work of fiction, and they can kill a movie if they’re not interesting. If a storyline doesn’t sound good on the surface, very few people will even want to go and see the film, making it fail before it even has a good chance to succeed.
Tragically, there are some movies that nailed the storyline but failed in every other aspect that makes a movie great. Whether this is because of behind-the-scenes issues, or just plain old bad filmmaking, there are several movies out there that had incredible plotlines that were sadly wasted in the wake of everything else about them.
‘Waterworld’ (1995)
Waterworld is the main film cinephiles think of when they imagine films with good plots that were poorly executed. The film is a post-apocalyptic sci-fi action movie that portrays a world that has been completely flooded. No land masses remain. Humanity settles on floating cities and villages and scavenges for supplies by diving beneath the waves of their watery prisons.
Tragically, the film suffered behind the scenes, with an enormous budget and a writing team practically bouncing off the walls, causing the script to be rewritten multiple times. With the film being an absolute disaster right out of the gates, there was never much hope it would succeed. Even though it really could have had things been handled a little better.
‘In Time’ (2011)
In Time is a science-fiction film with the premise of a bleak future in which time is money… literally. Each citizen of Earth has a timer embedded in their arms, which shows precisely how much time in their lives they have left. Buying things causes this time to decrease, while other things cause it to increase.
The idea of a dystopian world like this is creative and unique, but as with many other bad action movies, that creativity doesn’t transfer very well into anything else. Much of the film was described as boring despite its fascinating world.
‘Devil’s Pass’ (2013)
Devil’s Pass is a found footage horror film centering real-life Dyatlov Pass Incident, one of the most confounding unsolved in the world. The incident involved a group of skiers who entered a Russian mountain range and were later found dead under strange circumstances. A movie offering a fictional explanation to something that has baffled researchers for decades sounds so interesting on paper.
Unfortunately, the movie was just a bit too surreal. It winded up having to do with time paradoxes and suffered from an abundance of terrible CGI, which made the monsters that appear in the film laughable rather than scary.
‘The Core’ (2003)
The Core is yet another sci-fi movie with an interesting premise but winded up falling flat on its face. The story focuses on a bleak future where the core of the Earth mysteriously falls out of sync with Earth’s rotation and stops, causing multiple catastrophic anomalies. Whether this is physically possible is up for debate. To fix the problem, a team of researchers is sent to the core using a prototype drilling vehicle that will hopefully help get the core spinning again, thus preventing the end of the world.
The movie suffered from laughable CGI and gaping plot holes. Furthermore, many characters seemingly left their common sense back on the surface, making multiple questionable decisions that no expert in the field would likely make. Overall, it had great flavor but was not very well executed.
‘The Purge’ (2013)
The Purge was the first horror film in a franchise that spawned many sequels, each varying in their levels of mediocrity. The film explores the idea that the government implements one day a year when all crime, including murder, is perfectly legal. It sounds like a series with a lot of potential, but it was often wasted, especially in the first film.
Instead of portraying a group of ordinary citizens committing fun crimes such as breaking into zoos and riding the giraffes, it focuses on a group of murderers who invade a family home, turning what could have been a great crime movie into a yawn-filled slasher flick.
‘X-Men Origins: Wolverine’ (2009)
After the original X-Men film trilogy ended, fans were itching for more. Arguably one of the greatest parts of the trilogy was Hugh Jackman with his stellar portrayal of Wolverine. He had become remarkably popular with fans, so the filmmakers behind X-Men decided to shoot an origin story.
The glaring issue with X-Men Origins: Wolverine is how much it massacred the source material through a series of terrible choices. For example, they decided to make Deadpool (Ryan Reynolds), a superhero who is literally nicknamed “The Merc with the Mouth,” not have a mouth. Decisions like this made the movie a hot mess with little hope of redemption. Fortunately, the following X-Men sequels more than made up for it.
‘Apollo 18’ (2011)
Apollo 18 centers on the idea that NASA’s Apollo 17 mission to the Moon was not the final lunar mission and that there was an eighteenth that went wrong, prompting a mass cover-up. The found-footage horror film showed the desolate expanse of the Moon and the potentially dangerous creatures that inhabit it within the film’s canon.
The main problem is that the aliens were far from threatening, as they looked like rocks. Scary, right? The movie ultimately proved to be a snooze-fest with a languid pace and a very uneventful screenplay, which is a shame because it could have been so great.
‘After Earth’ (2013)
What happened in 2013 that led to so many good stories being wasted? At least with this one, there is an answer: M. Night Shyamalan. Shyamalan has produced a few gems, but he is mostly inconsistent, with this film possibly being his worst.
After Earth stars father and son duo Will Smith and Jaden Smith in a post-apocalyptic world where Earth has been uninhabited for decades. When their spaceship crashes on the blue planet, and they are separated, they must utilize every possible survival skill they know to find a way off the planet, which has quickly become a hostile environment in the absence of humans. Unfortunately, Shyamalan delivers some bizarre and unconventional writing and directing choices, none of which work, making the movie one convoluted mess. It wasted what could have been a phenomenal on-screen dynamic between the two actors.
‘Neon Lights’ (2022)
A fairly recent indie movie, Neon Lights is a psychological horror flick that many fans of the genre wanted desperately to like. The story features an entrepreneur who spends an entire decade living off the grid to preserve his rapidly declining mental health. When he emerges from his recluse, he invites his family to his estate for a reunion. The problem is, his mental health may not have been saved at all.
Critics deemed the movie to be a bit boring, with weak scares and languid pacing, though there were some redeeming qualities. The film was far from awful, but it wasn’t good.
‘Tomorrowland’ (2015)
Tomorrowland is a movie with an extremely promising premise but was brought low by the people who handled it. The film is about a secret utopian city that only the world’s smartest people are allowed to access, which can be done via a pin administered to them.
One reason it performed so poorly is that Disney produced and attempted to make it child-friendly, with all of the Disney cliches. It’s not that there’s anything wrong with that, but the movie could have been saved by going for a PG-13 rating, with a little more action and such. Above all, it was plagued by a cheesy, overdone moral that probably would have done better in a different setting.
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