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There’s nothing wrong with a movie taking itself seriously. Depending on the subject matter, it is often paramount that many movies do take themselves seriously. Not all movies are made equal, though, and some that should be a lot of fun, or at the very least lighthearted, seem to think they’re far more serious than they are. Then there are movies that try to have their fun cake and morosely eat it too.
It’s all about tonal balance, and movies that are filled with a dour atmosphere can’t turn around and make a light joke. As much as snarky humor has overtaken much of the multiplex and streaming services when it comes to mainstream movies, the opposite end of the spectrum isn’t much better, and while there’s always room for both extremes, some movies need to know that it’s okay to smile once in a while. These are ten movies that take themselves way too seriously and could’ve greatly benefited from lightening up.
‘Crash’ (2005)
To be clear, movies that try to tackle issues like systemic racism that aren’t some kind of heightened satire are probably best suited to taking themselves seriously. It’s when they get so self-serious that they treat every single moment of screentime as if it’s the most important moment ever filmed that the issues begin. Paul Haggis‘ sprawling L.A. drama Crash features an ensemble cast of cardboard characters committing and/or becoming the victims of racial prejudice. It’s a movie that takes itself so seriously, you’d think it had actually solved racism.
There are elements of Crash that are good. The actors are giving it their all, and then some, and many of them do find small moments that feel genuine in what is otherwise an over-the-top melodrama. They all speak in racially charged soundbites, colliding in scenes so contrived they could be used as the definition. Everything is meant to be profound in Crash, and it fundamentally misunderstands that racial prejudice is far more nuanced than a bunch of people hurling slurs at each other at the top of their lungs. Sometimes it’s that, sure, but it can also be quieter, more insidiously clever, and clever is not something that Crash knows how to do.
‘Max Payne’ (2008)
Max Payne comes from the era in Hollywood where movies based on video games did their level best to piss off the fans of those games. It was a not-so-great strategy that operated on the assumption that audiences who had no prior knowledge of the source material would be interested in watching a film based on it. In the case of Max Payne, a gritty neo-noir cop thriller starring Mark Wahlberg, that’s not a terrible assumption. The only problem is they forgot to make a good movie.
Hard-boiled pulp takes itself seriously, too seriously, even, which is exactly what Max Payne the video game does. It cranks the dial well past eleven and then breaks it off with prose so purple it’s practically plum. It’s a wacky game and part of what makes it fun is how seriously it does take itself, but everyone, down to the voice actors, is in on the joke. Nobody, least of all Wahlberg, seems to understand that their detective movie with bullet-time action and drug-induced demon hallucinations should be wicked fun to watch. Everyone involved in Max Payne seems to have been under the impression that they were making some kind of legitimate crime drama, and it was never meant to be that.
‘A Nightmare on Elm Street’ (2010)
Starting in the 2000s, horror remakes brought a whole new level of intensity to their franchises. These movies were undeniably successful at the box office, and definitely have their fans, but are almost universally inferior to their originals. Remakes of films like The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and The Hills Have Eyes were still too slickly produced to recapture the amateurish but far more unnerving qualities of their independently made progenitors, even with all the added gore. Then there’s something like A Nightmare on Elm Street, which was an attempt to go back to basics that went too far past.
Freddy Krueger is one of the few slasher icons known for his characterization and the performance behind it; he actually talks and has got all kinds of quips and comebacks. Initially, Freddy (Robert Englund) was a nightmarish villain whose sense of humor was much bleaker than bad puns. It’s not a bad instinct to want to return to that character, and Jackie Earle Haley is certainly giving a committed performance, but the film goes even more explicit with his character’s crimes. Child molestation was always implied with Freddy, but it was mostly brushed over very quickly. The remake makes it part of the text, and then also tries to psychologically examine the trauma of its victims. It’s serious subject matter that the movie cannot handle, making for a particularly gross watch.
‘Cowboys and Aliens’ (2011)
To look at the title Cowboys & Aliens without any further knowledge, most people would think it was some bargain bin sci-fi movie. They likely wouldn’t guess that it was made to be a major blockbuster, and there’s no way they’d think the movie took itself very seriously as a Western and mostly consists of Daniel Craig glowering at aliens and Harrison Ford. It’s a movie with as B-movie a premise as you can get, much like the cowboys and dinosaurs Ray Harryhausen cult classic The Valley of Gwangi. It should be a lot of dumb, creative fun, but it is only mostly dumb.
Inspired by the graphic novel of the same name, the film treats its premise as less trashy pulp and more Unforgiven with extra-terrestrials. There are a lot of archetypes and tropes of the Western genre thrown into the film, but none of them are ever subverted in any fun way to take advantage of the sci-fi possibilities. The plot is played completely straight, but it’s never original or captivating enough to keep your attention. There might be a good version of this movie that still plays it completely straight, but there’s definitely a version that plants its tongue in its cheek, and it’s definitely more fun.
‘RoboCop’ (2014)
Gritty reboot fever swept the nation in the 2000s and 2010s. While more grounded takes on classic characters like Batman and James Bond were certainly warranted, it was less suited to others. It was especially egregious when they started remaking ’80s movies, a decade known for how over-the-top its movies could go. Campy and/or corny movies like Clash of the Titans and Red Dawn were given grey, morose makeovers for the 21st century, bleeding them dry of the cheesy charm that had made them so watchable in the first place. No remake of an ’80s classic is more indicative of this misguided need to be charmless than RoboCop.
The original RoboCop is many things: an over-the-top, ultraviolent action movie, a satire of American consumerism and police privatization, even a Jesus analogy — it is all those things and more, but it is not serious. Director Paul Verhoeven had a unique command of tone that was apparent in all his sci-fi blockbusters. It’s something that’s proven basically impossible to replicate in all the sequels and remakes of his work. Maybe it’s for the best that the filmmakers behind this humorless PG-13 misfire with no satirical edge didn’t try to do the same thing as Verhoeven, but maybe they shouldn’t have made anything at all.
‘Spectre’ (2015)
Daniel Craig’s long tenure playing James Bond was always marked with inconsistencies. Casino Royale was an incredibly confident debut, but every film after was locked in a tonal tug-of-war. Quantum of Solace played everything seriously but also reduced everything to get as close to Jason Bourne’s territory as possible. Skyfall revitalized Craig and company by finding a pretty perfect balance between serious and playful, fan service and forging ahead, and struck what should’ve been the tone moving forward for any further Bond movies with Craig. Then came Spectre.
After Skyfall‘s success and acclaim, director Sam Mendes came back to direct a follow-up, and the budget ballooned to make a properly epic Bond adventure. And it’s epically boring. Spectre is some weird alchemy between indifference and extreme effort. The cinematography by Hoyt van Hoytema is unsurprisingly gorgeous, the score by Thomas Newman is ever more assured than his work in Skyfall, and the opening action setpiece in Mexico City is among the franchise’s very best. But the movie is all so laboriously made, with such seriousness given in attempting to make a Bond film that’s supposedly more prestigious. That tone, and its dissonance with the inherently silly Bond tropes the movie also engages, makes Spectre an actual chore to watch.
‘Bright’ (2017)
Imagine a buddy cop movie where the cops are an Orc and Will Smith: it sounds both insane and amazing. I want to see that movie. I did not want to see whatever Bright was. It’s meant to be some sort of urban fantasy cop thriller that’s also a commentary on prejudice and class inequality, but it’s never close to being that. Instead, it is mostly a series of scenes that alternate between nonsensical world-building and exposition dumps and hamfisted comparisons of fairytale creatures to real-life minority communities, using really broad stereotypes.
The issue is that director David Ayer, who directed the tonally similar Suicide Squad, doesn’t really have a mode for directing anything fantastical and relies on his comfort zone of making gritty crime movies. Also, the script may have been written on the backs of napkins from some Barcade. It’s an idea that could be either very weird and niche, like Alien Nation, or surprisingly crowd-pleasing if pitched right, like Smith’s own Men in Black franchise. Bright wants to be a small thriller and a grand fantasy. This movie was equipped to be something dumb or ridiculous and fun, but it was never going to be taken seriously like it wants to be.
‘Joker’ (2019)
There’s a long tradition of superheroes transitioning from bright and kid-friendly to dark and extreme and back again with multiple permutations. Sometimes it’s well-executed, or takes itself just seriously enough without forgetting its pulpy origins, like Logan; other times it skips right on past its deliberately edgy phase and lands deep in indulgent self-importance, like Joker. The movie sure doesn’t pull much from any of the character’s origins. There’s a bit of The Killing Joke here, a smattering of The Dark Knight Returns, but it mostly wants to be a Martin Scorsese film from the ’70s or ’80s.
Joaquin Phoenix is certainly working hard in the performance, which won him an Oscar but is also far from his best work. His version of the Joker is Arthur Fleck, a wannabe comedian and clown performer who’s a lot of Rupert Pupkin in The King of Comedy with the trigger-happy finger of Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver. Robert De Niro starred as both of those characters in their respective Scorsese films, and while it’s unfair to compare such monumental acting performances, it’s easier to point out how much better directed both movies are than Joker. Todd Phillips definitely has a knack for a certain kind of frat boy humor mixed with a darker, more depressive edge, but he’s unable to elevate anything in Joker to the level that it wants to be at.
‘Zack Snyder’s Justice League’ (2021)
The mere fact that Zack Snyder’s Justice League exists is an impressive, if not worrying, testament to the power of online fandom. It’s the culmination of Snyder’s vision for the short-lived DCEU, which is a relentlessly grim but emotionally shallow reinterpretation of characters known for wearing brightly-colored spandex. There’s a long, protracted and boring argument about the artistic merits of superhero cinema that once inflamed certain cinephile corners of the internet for about three days.
It’s immaterial, since it’s just a microcosm of a larger art-versus-commerce debate that never dies but only mutates. There have been superhero films that have made a real cultural impact, becoming milestones in pop culture to denote progress and inclusion. It’s films like Zack Snyder’s Justice League that really want you to believe that they’re something much more serious, that should make you run screaming for something like Batman and Robin instead. It’s an overlong, indulgent film that wants to be more transformative for its genre. It might be better than the theatrical cut, but that version barely qualifies as a movie, and at least it wasn’t four hours long.
‘The Batman’ (2022)
Of all the major superheroes who have successfully been taken seriously, Batman still reigns supreme. In the comics, writers like Frank Miller‘s gritty contributions to the character were often met with acclaim, and Christopher Nolan‘s gritty reboot of the character launched the entire trend in Hollywood. That trilogy skirts right up to the line of self-seriousness, if not occasionally stepping several toes over, particularly in The Dark Knight Rises, but they’re nothing compared to Matt Reeves‘ The Batman.
After Reeves had success with the latter two installments of the equally grounded Planet of the Apes reboot, he was given the keys to the Dark Knight’s kingdom. He decided to make the character even more grounded, scaling the gadgetry down even further and amping up the angst. The movie isn’t even an action film either, but rather a detective thriller, and not a very enthralling one. It’s a problem when the movie devotes a large portion of its near three-hour runtime to an investigation that’s not interesting or all that complex. When you’re already two steps ahead in the mystery over the “World’s Greatest Detective,” it makes the entire overly serious movie, and Robert Pattinson‘s goth performance, seem ridiculous and pointless.
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William Smith
Almontather Rassoul
