5 Historically Bad Series That Had Exactly One Good Scene

In the scene, Bilbo Baggins and his dwarf bros are captured by goblins and taken under the Misty Mountains to meet the Goblin King. The king greets them with a song, and for a brief two minutes, we get a respite from the misery of adventure scenes that play out like parodies of themselves. A big criticism of The Hobbit is that it's about 95 percent green screen. The robot apocalypse has begun, and it did not begin with violence, but with a Hobbit special effects artist yelling "Stop! Please! Stoooooop!" at a computer. This song is no exception, but by god, it isn't the rest of The Hobbit, so I will clutch it to my chest like a life preserver in a sea of director Peter Jackson's dreams.

A big thing that sets this apart from the rest of the movies is that it doesn't take itself seriously at all. So much of The Hobbit is meant to set up and extend the grandiose mythology of The Lord Of The Rings, which plays out in the form of a lot of people having flat conversations about magical bullshit with each other. But here, a CGI monstrosity of goblin fat and genital warts sings a song about how great it is to be a carnivorous dirt lord. And it almost distracts you from the reality that it's all a countdown until we get another action sequence that is a literal hour too long.

Warner Bros. Pictures
"And then they had a chase scene that lasted a fucking year. The End."

Before I continue, this is not a plea to put Kevin Nash in more movies. He's in the Magic Mike series, and he does alright for himself. In the wrestling world, his persona was "I fucked your girlfriend, brah," and thankfully, he doesn't bring that to the table here. Instead, he mostly grunts, and during his last moments, he moans like a bear getting a pine cone enema. And it fits his character perfectly. Sometimes characters need backstories to be improved, but all Kevin Nash needed to nail his character is a glance that says two simple words: Bear Enema.

Lionsgate
Bear. Enema.

Tom Jane, who plays the Punisher, does a really good job of getting his ass kicked in every way that a small apartment setting can support. So good, in fact, that I kind of wish this movie had been 90 minutes of ass-kicking and ten minutes of triumphant, last-chance victory. And the best part is that it's totally coherent. You can tell what is going on at all times, and in the superhero genre, which is mostly made up of an orgy of CG bouncing, that is an underrated trait. As Orson Welles said in The Making Of Citizen Kane: "In cinema, you must do two things. 1) You must realize that you are at the mercy of the audience. 2) Put Kevin Nash in a tiny T-shirt and make him stab that smaller man. Make him stab him good. I am Orson Welles, and I said this."

The only good scene in this trilogy occurs at the very end of The Phantom Menace. All of the protagonists are running around, as they're prone to do, when all of a sudden, a karate demon appears behind some sliding doors. Qui-Gon Jinn and Obi-Wan Kenobi stop as the karate demon holds up his lightsaber. A single red beam emerges from it. AND THEN, AS IF GEORGE LUCAS REACHED HIS SPECTRAL CLAW INTO MY SLEEPING HEAD AND PULLED OUT MY DEEPEST WISHES, ANOTHER RED BEAM EMERGES. The year is 1999. I am ten. A kid named Trevor poured a cup of water onto my slice of pizza at lunch today, but as of now, all in the world is right.

The heyday of George Lucas' more frenetic style of lightsaber dueling would last until the end of this scene. That's mainly because the fight here has some semblance of focus and tension, while the sword fights in the two films after it would be a smorgasbord of Wouldn't it be cool if ... Also, Lucas gives everyone their own unique styles. Darth Maul dances around like a homicidal ballerina. Obi-Wan keeps doing needless flips and keeps getting kicked in the face for it. And Qui-Gon battles very traditionally, because Liam Neeson doesn't need any fancy somersaults to school you in a space fight.

20th Century Fox
*thinks about flipping*

This scene also benefits from having "Duel Of The Fates" playing through half of it, which is the only song from the prequels that achieved any sort of staying power in our collective headspaces. I don't know what the chorus of voices in "Duel" are saying, but considering how hyped I get whenever I hear it, I can only assume it's a group of aliens shouting "IT'S ON, MOTHERFUCKERRRRRRR. IT'S OOOOOOONNNNNNN."

20th Century Fox
"WORLD STAAAAARRR. WORLD STA-AAAAAAAAAARRRR."

Even the action scenes pale into comparison to what came before them. Which is why the best scene in these two dumb but infinitely fascinating movies is one between Peter Parker and Gwen Stacey, which allows them to just talk to each other for a goddamn minute. Not to set up some kind of plot point, and not to drop hints about the future of the franchise, but just to give the audience a fleeting chance to like them a little more, and relate to their characters as more than "main character and his blonde lady pal."

A big problem with a lot of modern superhero films is that even the little moments between characters feels manufactured and obligatory. You gotta insert Dialogue Chunk C into the slot for Action Scene B and Emotional Note D to make any sense. But here, the lines shared between the two only serve to strengthen them. They don't necessarily HAVE to be goofily quipping with each other. If you exclude it, nothing about the plot is changed. But three years after this series was shitcanned in favor of Spider-Man: Homecoming, it's telling that the only thing regrettable about the loss is that we'll no longer get scenes like it.

Sony Pictures
Yep. The only regrettable thing.

There is no world that would allow director Marc Webb (who had previously made 500 Days Of Summer) to create a movie that's just about the relationship between Peter Parker and Gwen Stacy. If you presented that to me, I would have you dragged off the Sony backlot while I pitched Spider-Man vs. Men In Black to investors. But maybe it would be neat if we had something like that.

Sony Pictures
Probably need to be a prequel, though.

"Nah. Let's have the Avengers team up with the cast of Frozen. I'm trying to buy the bottom half of Florida, and I need something to cover the down payment."

However, in the first film, Bay nearly gets it right with the brief battle between Optimus Prime and Bonecrusher. Aside from it taking me about 12 times to remember the name of this evil robot ("Alexa, find me a video of ... Truck Fucker?"), this scene shows the benefit of pitting robots that don't look totally similar against each other. Optimus Prime is blue and red because U! S! A! U! S! A! And Bonecrusher is a dim khaki because it took two seconds to think of his name and one second to decide that he'd be dome-headed cannon fodder.

But with this, you can totally tell who is doing what. And at one point, Bone Crusher catches on fucking fire, because Michael Bay's entertainment tastes and my entertainment tastes aren't so different after all. That Optimus kills him by shoving a sword in his face is just icing on the cake. The fact that I can tell what is actually happening in a fight between two five-story robots is the reason that I'm throwing roses at the screen.

DreamWorks Pictures
Drop that shit in the Criterion Collection.

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