the pulp list

You take a chance, you produce a hit movie, so what’s the next step? Why, to extend the franchise and create a sequel to cash in, of course! While there are several examples of sequels that meet or exceed the high demands of their excellent predecessors (e.g., The Godfather, Part 2), most do a terrible job recreating the original magic. Below, we present the 15 most egregious examples of bad movie sequels.

15. Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines

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Tomato Meter:

The Terminator: 100%
Terminator 2: Judgment Day 97%
Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines: 70%

Who remembers the central lesson of Terminator 2? Jim Cameron’s 1991 smash hit introduced audiences to the phrase, “No fate but what we make.” As in, we are in control of our own destiny — nothing is set in stone. With T2, Cameron told all the story he wanted to tell (he also wrote and directed the first Terminator film). And yet, an entirely unnecessary sequel comes along and ruins the mythology.

Guess what? Everything we told you before about how you make your own choices and can avert a global nuclear catastrophe — it was bollocks, all of it. It happens anyway and it’s small wonder Cameron wanted nothing to do with this travesty. Sure, it might have scored a 70% tomato rating, but any picture that deviates so dramatically from its core narrative deserves to be on this list.

14. Dumb and Dumberer

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Tomato Meter:

Dumb and Dumber: 62%
Dumb and Dumberer: 10%

The Farrelly Brothers really delivered the laughs in 1994′s cult favorite Dumb and Dumber. Jim Carrey and Jeff Daniels’s brilliant performances as Lloyd and Harry on a cross-country trip to find Lloyd’s dream girl (Lauren Holly, whom Carrey would marry and later divorce in true Hollywood fashion) was met with commercial and critical acclaim. But when the two stars declined to do a sequel, New Line Cinema decided it would be a good idea to replace the stars with young unknowns and do a prequel, instead. To no one’s surprise, none of the magic of the first film made it and is notable mainly for Eric Christian Olsen’s spot-on imitation of Jim Carrey. But not much else.

13. The Whole Ten Yards

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Tomato Meter:

The Whole Nine Yards: 45%
The Whole Ten Yards: 4%

Now, we realize that The Whole Nine Yards was not exactly a critical success, but it had its moments and Bruce Willis gave an excellent performance and provided much of the film’s comic relief as an exiled mob hit man. How all the stars made the decision to be a part of the horrific script in The Whole Ten Yards we can only guess that it must have been for the paycheck. We wonder what became of the movie producer who approved dressing up Kevin Pollack in prosthetic makeup and returning as his father. What are the odds this executive is now out of work?

12. Highlander 2: The Quickening

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Tomato Meter:

Highlander: 66%
Highland 2: 0%

Yes, you read that right: 0% tomato rating. Highlander 2 has to go down as one of the biggest stinker sequels of all time. How do you follow up a simple, entertaining yarn about immortals battling each through the centuries in an effort to bring about the mysterious ‘quickening’? If you guessed hokey science fiction about permanent worldwide darkness, and — no stretch here — that the immortals are really aliens from the planet Zeist, you guessed right! Also, Sean Connery’s character Ramirez from the first film is conveniently revived, for reasons we still don’t understand. Total, utter, epic fail.

11. Blues Brothers 2000

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Tomato Meter:

Blues Brothers: 84%
Blues Brothers 2000: 45%

How do you screw up an absolute classic comedy filled with action, humor and musical numbers? You replace an overweight comedic legend (John Belushi) with another overweight mediocre one (no disrespect to John Goodman, after all he was Walter Sobchak) in an all-too-unnecessary sequel and hope nobody notices. Blues Brothers was an institution for almost 20 years before a sequel was given the green light. Blues Brothers 2000 really did not stand an inkling of a chance to be successful and is one of those forgettable second comings that fortunately doesn’t seem to have affected the priceless nature of the original.

10. Basic Instinct 2

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Tomato Meter:

Basic Instinct: 59%
Basic Instinct 2: 7%

Speaking of unnecessary sequels… A lot of the allure of the original Basic Instinct was its sexual shock value. At the time, a major star opening her legs and showing the va-jay-jay on camera was something very new for mainstream cinema. It made an even bigger star out of Sharon Stone and took audiences into a new age where nothing seemed off limits on the silver screen.

Basic Instinct 2, by contrast, confirmed that there’s nothing new under the sun with its below-average story and more than anything else made Stone look desperate to reclaim her star power. She is obviously past her prime. Note to other aging starlets: this is a good lesson how not to revive your career.

9. The Godfather Part 3

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Tomato Meter:

The Godfather: 100%
The Godfather Part 2: 98%
The Godfather Part 3: 66%

Part 3 wasn’t THAT bad. Really, the reason it ranks here is a) in relative comparison to how magnificent the first two are, and b) Sophia Coppola. She just sucks the air out of every scene. Somehow she is both wooden and petulant simultaneously and her performance shocks the viewer out of his disbelief. We can’t help but remember we’re watching a movie whenever we see her, so any hope of getting lost in the narrative is gone — when she makes us realize we that WE’RE WATCHING A MOVIE. One with a bad child actor (who by some strange occurrence has gone on to be quite a remarkable director in her own right). The elder Coppola’s a genius, to be sure. But when it comes to casting women roles, he sure knows how to misfire (see also Diane Keaton).

8. Karate Kid 3

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Tomato Meter:

The Karate Kid: 89%
The Karate Kid Part 2: 35%
The Karate Kid Part 3: 27%

What child of the 80s doesn’t include part 1 as one of his favorite teen movies of the decade? We laughed, cried and cheered with Daniel LaRusso and everyone’s favorite handy man, Mr. Miyagi. The sequel, while not quite as good, had its place and picked up nicely where the first one left off, introducing us to more of Mr. Miyagi’s past and gave his character additional depth. The third one, though, just didn’t fit into the story arc anywhere. The only reason we don’t include The Next Karate Kid is that it is a disaster of a totally different kind.

7. Staying Alive

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Tomato Meter:

Saturday Night Fever: 89%
Staying Alive: 0%

Staying Alive marks our second 0% tomato reading on this list. While many laud Pulp Fiction as the vehicle that revived john Travolta’s career, most people probably don’t realize what sunk his career in the first place. The answer? Staying Alive. After a successful run starring in the TV sitcom Welcome Back Kotter, Travolta took advantage of the era’s disco and club mania and produced the mega hit and cult classic Saturday Night Fever. Further propelling him into stardom was his opportunity to star as the lead in Grease and the bull rider’s anthem Urban Cowboy.

Then tragedy (or should we say travesty?) struck when some vindictive manager or perhaps a jealous relative convinced him to make a sequel that totally flopped. It was a lame attempt to capitalize on the success of its predecessor and just about killed Travolta’s career. Thank God for Quentin Tarantino.

6. Speed 2: Cruise Control

Amazon

Tomato Meter:

Speed: 90%
Speed 2: 2%

Hollywood loves to milk a hit. Speed was a simple straightforward action flick, good guys and bad guys, and everything turns out right in the end — the kind of thing mainstream audiences love. So naturally, the movie studio figures if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it! But we can’t tell exactly the same story; no, that would be too obvious. So this time, instead of, um, a bus, let’s do it on a boat! It’s like a totally different movie!

There is not much to say about this disaster flick except that DISASTER seems to be the appropriate word. Keanu Reeves must have great representation, because he stayed far, far away from this movie. Sandra Bullock, by contrast, must not, but it doesn’t seem to have affected her career too much. Except maybe to give her a humorous answer to one of those “do you ever regret accepting a script?” questions.

5. Batman & Robin

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Tomato Meter:

Batman: 70%
Batman Returns: 77%
Batman Forever: 45%
Batman & Robin: 12%

When Tim Burton and Michael Keaton teamed up to make Batman and Batman Returns, fans and critics alike were thrilled with the results. When the pair left the franchise, Val Kilmer took over and we still had hope. But it’s clear that movie didn’t live up to the originals and we started downhill. He decided to bolt after one movie leaving George Clooney to fill his shoes in what must arguably be his worst role ever.

This movie was bad bad bad from beginning to end, with cheesy villains (The Governator as Mr. Freeze, Uma as Poison Ivey and Bane looking like some cheap stuffed animal), an insultingly unbelievable story and a totally unnecessary Batgirl (Alicia Silverstone). It started off so well, with so much promise, and then died on the vine.

4. Quantum of Solace

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Tomato Meter:

Casino Royale: 94%
Quantum of Solace: 63%

This may be a somewhat a controversial choice, since Casino Royale (94%) is not that far a spread from Quantum of Solace (63%), at least to many reviewers. But that undeservedly high rating totally masks how achingly dull and disappointing a sequel Quantum really is. All the things that made the first one great were missing: humor, subtlety, romantic banter, rich dialogue, clear narrative and dynamic pacing. In short, virtually everything that made Casino Royale the best Bond film in the franchise just went totally out the window with a Bond who was stone-faced, sullen, humorless, and driven to puzzling violence. Plus, Bond didn’t even get the girl!

Worse was how silly the plot was: a fight for water? What happened to real bad guys? Dominic Greene was a pale, ineffectual lout of a villain compared to Mads Michelson’s brooding and ominous character. I was shocked to learn that it was written by the same team that produced the superb Casino Royale — I thought for sure it must have been somebody else came along to ruin the new franchise. Looks like director Marc Forster just didn’t have the light touch that Martin Campbell brought and the result, compared to the stellar original, was hugely disappointing.

3. Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End

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Tomato Meter:

Pirates of the Caribbean: 78%
Pirates of the Caribbean 2: 53%
Pirates of the Caribbean 3: 45%

Similar to #4, the two ‘Pirates’ sequels lacked virtually everything that made the first one great. The first film was lively, funny, economical, with a plot that was complex yet still easily understood, all backed up by twin luminous performances by Depp as Captain Sparrow and Geoffrey Rush as Barbosa. I don’t know about you, but anytime Depp was not on screen in the first film, it seemed like I was just waiting around for him to come back: he was that electric. It worked because the scope of the film was small enough for him to fill it.

But the sequels grew more ambitious in their plot and therefore more unwieldy, trying to cram in so much storytelling that it obscured the simple, elegant nuances of the performances in the original. It’s like the actors are just obstacles in the way of the movie driving from scene to scene, and in the end I was just scratching my head wondering who was doing what, and why should I care? Lastly, what seemed a promising and credible love story ballooned into two people going through the motions of being lovers without actually appearing to like each other. We included the third film here because, while the second sequel was quite bad, the franchise was not yet ruined irreparably: a killer third sequel could have saved it. Alas, that was not this film.

2. The Matrix: Reloaded

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Tomato Meter:

The Matrix: 86%
The Matrix Reloaded: 73%
The Matrix Revolutions: 37%

Reloaded easily ranks among the greatest letdown in recent cinematic history. It’s true that Revolutions was actually a worse film, but this is the one that veered off the tracks — that dashed our hopes so profoundly following its predecessor masterpiece. In the original, we listen at the very end as Neo explains to the machines from the phonebooth that he’s going to show them a world without rules, borders or boundaries; a world without the machines. Then, he promptly flies out of frame to a rocking (and fitting) ‘Rage Against the Machine’ song. And we’re left with four years of waiting to see how Neo would lead the uprising against the machines, realize his full potential and free humans from their bondage.

But that’s not the story we got. Instead, we get long stretches of near-meaningless dialogue, something to do with a Frenchmen and a small Asian dude, a fight with countless Agents Smith that Neo simply flies away from when he gets bored, a suddenly impotent Morpheus and whiny Trinity, and worst of all: Spring Break Zion. Once we learned what Zion was, I no longer particularly felt it was a humanity worth saving, and at that point the film became irredeemable. (Also, turns out the ‘One’ is just a handy plot device to segue into the Matrix online MMORPG spinoff and another, less interesting sequel.) As in most of the movies on this list, this one almost made the first one seem an accident, the way everything that was great about it seemed to be left out almost by design. Not even the late, magnificent Gloria Foster (as the original Oracle) could save it.

1. Star Wars Episode 1: The Phantom Menace

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Tomato Meter:

Star Wars: 94%
The Empire Strikes Back: 97%
Return of the Jedi: 75%
The Phantom Menace: 62%

In order to score tickets to the first showing of Episode 1 in May 1999, after 20 years of fervent expectation, I spent a night outside a theater waiting in line. I really, really wanted it to be great. It really, really could not have been any worse. Sure, I tried to convince myself — like many others — that it wasn’t really that bad, that maybe there were a few elements here and there that didn’t quite work right, but overall the film served its purpose to advance the narrative. Years later, I confronted the cold, terrifying truth: no filmmaker could have set out to produce a worse film if he tried.

Plot, characters, pacing — all rubbish. There’s so much Lucas could have done: shown us the glory years of the Jedi Order, follow them along on important missions, learn more about the mysterious and mystical ways of the Force, sympathize with all the tough choices a talented, powerful, charismatic Anakin Skywalker has to make and agonize over his fall… Nope, we got none of that. Just an incomprehensible, unbelievable and convoluted story about a snotty kid no one cares about and the rogue Jedi knight that forces him down everyone’s throat. Oh, and the Force is really just a bacterial infection.

But since cataloguing all the myriad ways this unmitigated disaster of a film would take too long, I’ll let this crazy fellow from Slashfilm do it for me:

(Be sure to watch all 7 videos.)

There’s no greater failure to meet expectations for a sequel (or prequel, in this case) than The Phantom Menace, and so it sits securely at our top spot. But you know the worst thing? Lucas himself doesn’t seem to care terribly much about how badly received the prequels were, like there’s something wrong with us about how badly he screwed them up. Oh well, there’s always fan fiction…

Dishonorable Mention:

Teen Wolf Too
Ocean’s 12
Son of the Mask
Jaws 3D