Ugh. Here we go folks. Back to the bad with the Worst Directors. These were the guys who screwed things up worse than everybody else in the last year! The Worst Directors of 2012!
Click through to see who earned this ignominious honor.
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Peter Berg
“Battleship”
Given a 209 million dollar budget, and basically freed from needing to bear any resemblance to the actual board game, Berg came up with one of the biggest laughingstocks of the year. “Battleship”. Full of bad acting, silly action sequences, and head-scratching story elements, the highest praise “Battleship” has been earning is “Dumb Fun”. It’s the type of Summer Blockbuster that gives Summer Blockbusters a bad name.
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Dan Bradley
“Red Dawn”
It almost seems unfair to pick on the guy who’s saddled with remaking a 30 year old B Movie with a bunch of pretty youngins… that is until you see what a convoluted mess “Red Dawn” turned out to be. The funny thing is, for a long time second unit director/stunt coordinator… there aren’t even any good action sequences. After a mess like this, I smell a trip back down to the minors.
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Rob Cohen
“Alex Cross”
Cohen is no rookie. His credits, in fact, include some decent, entertaining films (“Dragonheart”, “The Fast and the Furious”) but this is junk, pure and simple. The two lead performances were underwhelming, the story was garbage, and he did nothing stylistically worth mentioning. When it wasn’t busy being silly it was drab, and he has to answer for how it turned out.
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Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor “Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance”
Early in the year, Neveldine and Taylor took their juvenile adrenaline junkie sensibilities to a superhero franchise with the second big screen outing of “Ghost Rider”. Not that the first was any good, but these two manage to make the sequel feel like “Crank Lite” and somehow fail to get a good bad performance out of Nic Cage. Probably by encouraging him to act crazy.
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Mabrouk El Mechri
“The Cold Light of Day”
Mechri landed himself an action movie after the positive reception of JCVD, and with it, he did next to nothing. Given two big name stars and the up and comer who will soon be known as Superman, he motivated them all to the heights of blandness and then loaded the rest of the film with bargain basement action sequences. It’s almost as if he didn’t know what he was doing so he just copied other… oh, wait.
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There you go. The directors that fumbled the ball the worst this last year.
Anyone I’m being unduly unkind to? Anyone I let off the hook via omission? Which one of these clowns should wear the crown?
Let us hear it!
Gotta highfive ya on all these, esp Rob Cohen. What garbage he did…and I don’t understand why with James Patterson on board with the project. Poor Tyler Perry who ventured out of his wig-covered comfort zone. Alex Cross’s problems weren’t Perry’s fault. I blame Cohen! He deserves this win. with 2nd runner up being Peter Berg for destroying the beauty of the name of a beloved classic game from my childhood.
Please also give an honorable mention to Mans Marlind & Bjorn Stein who took the directing reigns from Len Wiseman for Underworld Awakening and made the worst of the series.
You know? Aside from the original, Awakenings is the only one I’ve seen of the series, so I couldnt tell the difference.
As far as Tyler Perry in Alex Cross, can I just say I didnt think he brought a lot to the table, either? That’s where I shake out on it. If we were lining them up for blame, I’d put him last, certainly, but I’m not about to let him completely off the hook, either.
Meanwhile, thank you for your support, I think these guys all let us down in one way or another. LOL
Ridley Scott for Prometheus.
Just kidding. Even though that movie did suck pretty hard.
Gotta agree with all of your choices here. Nice list.
Thanks Brik.
Believe it or not, I actually briefly considered Sir Ridley. Honest. Then I had to shake it off, but… It does tell you his name will get thought of when the subject of poor directing from last year came up.
Probably unfair, but still…
The first Ghost Rider was campy fun. The second was just utter garbage, not only for the bad direction but for 2 terrible performances-Cage and Hinds.
Agreed. It was the type of thing that obviously fell on the directing, too.
I’d say Cold Light of Day. I managed to make it to the END CREDITS of all the other ones (except Red Dawn, which I haven’t seen, and won’t see. One awkward Thor role in Cabin In The Woods was enough for me, no more:), but I only got like 20 minutes into CLOD and had to stop. I was just incredibly bored! It’s not the actors, it’s, idk what it is. Just boring. Can’t wait for Superman though (ergo, I have nothing against Cavill, or Willis, as we already know:)!
It only got worse from there, Livi, too. Trust me. This guy managed to make car chases and shootouts boring!
That’s hard to do!!
Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor BY FAR.
Their Attempt At Making A Flick Almost Made Me Ill.
I Was/Am Pissed About How Crappy The Second “Ghost Rider” Panned Out.
Like I Said In My Quickie Review Of It, Even A Cameo From One Of My Favorite Schlock Actors Ever, CHRISTOPHER LAMBERT, Couldn’t Save It.
It Was THAT Bad.
And Nic Cage Was Awful In It To Boot.
So Double
-B.
The double frown smiley… Look at what they’ve driven us to!!
Lol. They hacked it up, no doubt about it. You could feel their fingerprints everywhere on it, and not in a good way.
I went in with mild hopes for it due to seeing both of them present footage at a NYCC panel, but… It didn’t turn out well at all.
I love Peter Berg’s expression in that pic. “Oh yeah, I just gots me 209 million bucks y’all.”
LOL. In fairness to him, the film earned a profit.
So, it wasn’t a flop at least.
Dan Bradley takes this hands down if you dont include the films, The Devil inside, Dark Shadows or The Dictator.
Apparently, I didnt. Dark Shadows wasn’t wnough of a mess for me to toss a big name like Burton under the bus. Was it a disappointment? Yes, and I called it out as such. But is it one of the worst jobs all year? No.
Meanwhile, The Devil inside was a low budget production job from a nobody. really. It’ll see its day in court, but I like for my Worst Directors to have a little more in terms of resources and/or possibilities before throwing them into the mix here. All of these folks had resources to work with, and most of them had a property to work off of.
The Dictator was just an average comedic fail. If I open that door, I’ll have to expand the field to 50.
Thats okay, even including the other 49 its likely Dan Bradley would still have won.
Since all these films missed the mark, I guess I’d go with the biggest money loser.
Battleship and Ghost Rider(2) actually made money. RDawn and ACross lost similar amounts though I don’t think much was expected of RDawn.
The Cold Light of Day is my vote with a crap film of phone in performances that made less than $11M per imdb with no reported budget which means it lost quite a bit of money in my book. And was this a remake of an ’89 flick? Anyhoo, El Mechri’s filming should be frozen (hace mucho frio; es verdad) if this is his goal. Maybe the script just stunk; idk. Nice post of dulled down directors.
Thanks! And very sound reasoning, here, to reach your conclusion.
I’m not 100% sure Cold Light of Day is a remake though. No reference to that on Wikipedia…
In all other regards you’re right about it though. It was shite. LOL
I’m happy to say I haven’t watched any of these, but I’ll vote for Peter Berg. How he didn’t get the same ripping as Andrew Stanton is a mystery to me.
His movie didnt lose a ton of money like Stanton’s did.
And I did consider Stanton here as well, but I think John Carter turned out to be much more watchable than these… plus, most of the faults there were on the marketing, high concept, script, etc etc. There were just a ton of things going on. It was hard to just pin it on Stanton.
Well, thank God Ridley Scott is not here
Head exploding time? LOL
Your list reminds me that there wasn’t a Michael Bay or M Night Shyamalan movie this year.
Did you do a post on your favorite 2012 movies? I’d be very interested!
Mañana! Around 5ish or so.
Tomorrow’s agenda: Best animated, Worst movies, and Best movies Tune in, should be a big day!!
And we’ll get one of those two this year at least. I dont think I’ll know what to do with myself if Shyamalan’s movie (After Earth) is actually watchable… Its been so long!
It sounds to me as if in terms of squandered potential, Cold Light of Day is the front-runner here. Interesting premise, big name actors… a complete failure on that has to be the fault of the director, right?
Well… he had the big name actors, that’s what he squandered most. I mean, I’m sure he didnt have them more than a couple of days… but they gave him nothing.
The concept was really rather thin, actually. That flick was hollow.
Berg had the big budget, and Neveldine and Taylor had the cool character of Ghost Rider… so I’d say one of those two squandered the best opportunity, I think.
“Cool character”… “Ghost Rider”… you know, I’ve never been able to reconcile those phrases with each other. It’s similar to how, although I disliked Spider-Man 3, the treatment of Venom wasn’t a major problem for me. Just never was that impressed to begin with.
I can’t help noticing that these are all action flicks. Do you think Hollywood is trying to say something about action fans based on the directors they assign to these pictures? Maybe they figure that the “adrenaline junkies” won’t notice, so they don’t need to worry too much about quality. And they don’t fear the idea that peple will stop coming, because the fans will always need their next “fix”.
Or maybe Fogs is getting soft on us and liking Rom Coms more. Hehehehehe.
Sorry. I couldn’t resist that last line. Cant wait to see your Worst Picture list!
HAHA! Noooo. Me loving on the Rom Coms…. LOL. Let’s get real.
Big day for all that stuff tomorrow. Best and Worst Movies, plus animated flicks this year (broke my heart last year not to recognize “Rango” somehow!!)
As for action flicks, its probably just an easy jumping in point for second unit directors, you know? Because theyre already versed to an extent, I suppose. In fairness only a couple of these qualify, but… there is something going on there.
There could have easily been some horror movies in this mix too. I really weighed Ariel Schulman and Henry Joost for Paranormal Activity 4, but held off at the last minute thinking that most of that films problems were script based (it was close, and it was their script, too). Horror movies seem to be easy to get made, too…
Berg. Clearly. That has to rank as a crime against humanity to waste that much money n that bad a film. Ghost Rider at least looked good.
It’s true, he definitely had the most resources. It’s worth noting that it DID make a decent return… But still, that was some laughable stuff. You can’t do that when you have so much invested.
Neveldine and Taylor. There are two of them and they still made a film that atrocious. *puke*
LOL. I know right? YOu’d think that somehow that would work to their advantage, wouldn’t you? Like they could cover more ground or act like a system of checks and balances, LOL
Okay, they were all bad enough in their ways that I can’t pick which stands out as worst. I’m going to go with the guy who managed to over-direct Cage so badly that Cage failed to do what he can normally do as naturally as breathing.
Another vote for Neveldine and Taylor. Indeed, they were quite atrocious!!
Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor
Yeah, LOL. They’re strong candidates here, aren’t they?