5 Biggest Movie Disappointments of 2015

Evergreen Movie 2015 Lists about 9 years agoby Ben Pearson

2015 was a rough year for America, but it ended up being a pretty terrific year for film. Still, there were a group of movies that ended up disappointing me because I didn’t think they fully lived up to their potential. I suspect your list won’t look exactly like mine since we all go into movies with different expectations and different levels of anticipation, but here, in no particular order, are my six biggest movie disappointments of this year in film.

Avengers: Age of Ultron

I’ve voiced this concern elsewhere on the site already, but to me, Avengers: Age of Ultron marked a major turning point in the history of Marvel Studios. It was the first time I thought there was simply too much going on at once — too many characters, too many story beats, too many side quests — to the point where it made me almost completely check out of the film. I grew up loving this stuff, and I’ve been a big fan of almost all of the Marvel Studios films up to this point (sorry, Thor franchise), so when someone who is super excited to see a movie like this walks out disappointed, there might be something wrong. I really like the idea of Tony Stark creating a program that becomes sentient and tries to wipe out the planet, but Age of Ultron often felt more like a studio-mandated checklist than a well-told story, and we all know how the stress and behind the scenes back-and-forth essentially broke Joss Whedon. On paper, Captain America: Civil War and Avengers: Infinity War sound really cool in that “Oh yeah, we’re getting to see these awesome characters fight with each other and then reunite to bring down Thanos!” kind of way, but after seeing how many characters were shoved into Ultron and knowing that even more are going to be in future films, I find it hard to believe that there’s going to be enough time to give fans enough of the characters they want to see when there’s perpetually so much set-up that has to be done for upcoming films. I’d love to be proven wrong about that with those movies, but Age of Ultron doesn’t have me particularly optimistic about the future of the MCU.

Chappie

I wasn’t thrilled with Elysium, Neill Blomkamp’s follow-up to District 9, mainly because I didn’t think the script was very good. Blomkamp wrote that one all by himself, so when I heard he was reuniting with his District 9 writing partner Terri Tatchell for Chappie, it raised my expectations and I hoped this could be a return to form. Now I know better: I’d rewatch Elysium over Chappie any day without hesitation. The choice to include Die Antwoord members Ninja and Yo-Landi Visser as the leads crippled the film from the get-go (they’re so clearly not professional actors and they’re so bad, it feels like punishment having to watch them through the whole movie), and though I appreciate some of the larger concepts Blomkamp attempted to tackle here, they’re handled in such a nonsensical way that they simply don’t have the desired effect. Cool visual effects alone can’t save a film like this — there needed to be a really solid foundation, and this script failed to match that description.

Tomorrowland

I was really looking forward to Brad Bird’s second live-action effort, because there were so many potentially cool aspects at play that sounds like I would have loved: a completely original story, a female protagonist not saddled with a love interest, NASA, the secret history of Disney, a mysterious countdown clock, inventors, science. But aside from one jubilant scene in which the main character travels to Tomorrowland for the first time, the film couldn’t quite capture the effervescent magic the trailers and premise promised. It’s a movie that wants to be optimistic about our future, but while it brings up some decent points (“how can we live in a world in which there are simultaneous obesity epidemics and hunger strikes?”), it never does anything meaningful with those observations. For a movie called Tomorrowland, so little of the movie actually takes place there, and Britt Robertson’s character is essentially sidelined in the climactic moments in her own film as George Clooney gets to be the one to save the world. I loved the concept, but I wish they would have delved deeper with this one.

Spectre

I wrote a ton about my history with the Bond franchise and my in-depth feelings about Spectre when the movie came out, and while I still think the movie is in the top 10 Bond films, the more I think about it, the less I like it. I don’t mind the whole “surveillance state” subplot as much as I did on first watch — it is a spy movie, after all — but what they did with Christoph Waltz’s character is practically unforgivable, and it really does have a negative narrative effect on the previous Daniel Craig Bond films. But in a year packed with some pretty spectacular spy films, and coming on the heels of Skyfall, it’s hard to see how Spectre could be considered anything other than a disappointment.

Ted 2

I know Seth MacFarlane is an intelligent person, so it’s frustrating to see his insistence on going for the quickest, easiest joke all the time. It’s especially disappointing in Ted 2, a film that seemed like his chance for redemption after the failed A Million Ways to Die in The West, and a sequel to a movie that did mega box office numbers and seems generally well-liked. But whatever magic was present the first time around has worn off, and I might have been able to better stand seeing Ted and Mark Wahlberg’s characters being rewarded for acting like immature idiots if the film was rip-roaringly funny. Sadly, though, most of the jokes missed the mark for me.

What were your biggest movie disappointments of 2015? Sound off in the comments below.