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A good action movie makes you forget you’re sitting in a theater. A bad one reminds you at every turn, with the stunt that’s clearly a stuntman, the fight scene cut so fast you can’t follow it, the one-liner that gets a groan instead of a laugh. There is nothing worse than disappointing yourself with a bad movie in a cinema with popcorn in your hands.
These ten films in the list below failed in just about every way an action movie can. A few had decent budgets and big stars, a couple had famous source material, and some had nothing going for them from the start but somehow all of them managed to be worse than they should be. Here they are, ranked from rough to the worst.
10
‘Street Fighter’ (1994)
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Image via Universal Pictures</figure>
Colonel Guile (Jean-Claude Van Damme) leads an international task force against the dictator M. Bison (Raul Julia), who is holding hostages and threatening to take over the world. Chun-Li (Ming-Na Wen) and Cammy (Kylie Minogue) join the fight, along with a long list of characters from the video game, each thrown in with others. Street Fighter turned a game about one-on-one fighting into a war movie, and the fights end up a small part of it.
Julia was dying of cancer while making the film, and he took the part because his kids loved the game. He died not long after it came out, and most people agree he’s the only reason to watch it. His villain chews up every scene he’s in, and he delivers his lines with a joy the rest of the cast never matches. Van Damme, on the other hand, just looks tired.
9
‘Superman IV: The Quest for Peace’ (1987)
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Image via Warner Bros.</figure>
Superman (Christopher Reeve) decides to rid the world of nuclear weapons by gathering every missile on Earth and throwing it into the sun. Lex Luthor (Gene Hackman) strikes back by creating Nuclear Man (Mark Pillow), a golden-haired villain powered by sunlight, and the two fight everywhere from the Great Wall of China to the moon. Lenny Luthor (Jon Cryer), Lex’s nephew, is there for comic relief. Superman IV: The Quest for Peace was the fourth movie in the series, and the last to star Reeve.
The studio, Cannon Films, cut the budget in half midway through, so the flying effects look like wires on a soundstage. Reeve helped come up with the story because he cared about the anti-nuclear message, but the finished film mostly feels cheap. It shut down the franchise for almost twenty years.
8
‘Batman & Robin’ (1997)
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Image via Warner Bros. Pictures</figure>
Batman (George Clooney) and Robin (Chris O’Donnell) team up with Batgirl (Alicia Silverstone) to stop Mr. Freeze (Arnold Schwarzenegger) and Poison Ivy (Uma Thurman), who want to freeze Gotham and fill it with plants. Freeze speaks almost entirely in ice puns, and Schwarzenegger reportedly earned around $25 million for it. Batman & Robin was directed by Joel Schumacher, who’d made the previous film in a similar style.
The suits have nipples on them, which became the thing everybody remembers, and the action looks like a toy commercial more than a movie. Clooney has joked for years that he nearly killed the Batman franchise, and Schumacher later apologized to fans who were let down. Warner Bros. shelved the series for years and then rebooted it with a much darker tone.
7
‘Rollerball’ (2002)
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Image via Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Pictures</figure>
Jonathan Cross (Chris Klein) is a hockey player who moves to Central Asia to play Rollerball, a violent sport where players race around a track on skates and motorcycles. He becomes a star, then realizes the owner, Petrovich (Jean Reno), is rigging games to make the fights bloodier. LL Cool J plays his teammate Marcus, and Rebecca Romijn plays Aurora, his love interest. Rollerball is a remake of a 1975 film, directed by John McTiernan of Die Hard fame.
The game scenes were shot with night-vision cameras, so the action is almost impossible to follow, which is a big problem for a movie about a sport. Test audiences reportedly hated it, and the studio re-edited it before release. It made only a fraction of its budget back, and McTiernan’s career never really recovered.
6
‘Catwoman’ (2004)
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Image via Warner Bros.</figure>
Patience Phillips (Halle Berry) is a shy graphic designer who dies, comes back with cat-like abilities, and starts hunting the people who killed her. Tom Lone (Benjamin Bratt), a police detective, falls for her, and Laurel Hedare (Sharon Stone) runs the cosmetics company behind the plot. Catwoman has almost nothing to do with the Selina Kyle character from the comics, and the director, Pitof, was a visual effects artist who’d never made a feature film.
The CGI cat movements look rubbery and unreal, and the basketball scene has become a joke all its own. Berry showed up in person to accept her Razzie for Worst Actress, holding the Oscar she won for Monster’s Ball, and thanked the studio for putting her in “a piece of… crap.” The movie won four Razzies in total.
Four action series. One of them is built around exactly the way you
handle pressure, people, and a room that has just gone very quiet. Here is where you would survive
the trilogy, and probably headline it.
You are precision with a grudge. You don’t posture, you don’t
escalate, and you don’t warn anybody twice. That is exactly why the people who know you are
so careful never to be the reason you start.
- The Wick films run on discipline: an underworld with actual etiquette, a hero who
honours every rule of it, and a world that unravels the instant someone breaks one
against him. - You share that quality. You are extraordinarily reasonable right up to the line, and
then completely immovable past it. - Focus, commitment and sheer will. You’d be the one carrying grief through three sequels
and turning it into technique rather than noise. - People wouldn’t call you dangerous. They’d say your name quietly and let that do the
work.
You understand the thing the whole franchise is secretly about:
the cars are spectacular, but the crew is the point. You collect people, you keep them, and
you’d drive through a building for any one of them.
- This series went from street racing to orbit without ever changing its actual subject,
because loyalty scales and plot doesn’t have to. - You have the same instinct. You build a family out of whoever turns up, and then you
defend it past the point of reason. - You’d thrive here because the franchise rewards exactly your strengths: warmth, nerve,
an absolute refusal to leave anyone behind, and a relaxed relationship with physics. - The mission can wait. The barbecue cannot.
You over-prepare and then take the dangerous part yourself
anyway. It looks like control, but it’s really responsibility. You have never worked out how
to ask somebody else to carry the risk.
- This is the franchise of the plan that collapses on schedule: the team, the mask, the
rooftop, and the one person sprinting flat out because sprinting is all that’s left. - You share that refusal to accept an outcome. Told the odds, you treat them as an
administrative error. - You’d thrive here because these films reward competence and loyalty in equal measure.
The mission matters, but nobody on the team gets left on the wrong side of a door. - Some people delegate the cliff. You have never once been that person.
You are not the most trained person in the building, the best
equipped, or the one anybody would have picked. You are simply the one still standing at the
end, which turns out to be the only qualification that matters.
- Die Hard invented the modern action hero by making him mortal: outgunned, out-planned,
bleeding, and extremely funny about it. - You share that stubbornness. Adversity doesn’t make you noble, it makes you sarcastic,
and then it makes you unstoppable. - You’d thrive here because these films reward improvisation and nerve over preparation,
and you’ve never had the luxury of preparing anyway. - You didn’t want any of this. You just declined to be the person who let it happen.
5
‘Elektra’ (2005)
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Image via 20th Century Fox</figure>
Elektra Natchios (Jennifer Garner), an assassin brought back from the dead after the events of Daredevil, takes a job to kill a man and his teenage daughter, then decides to protect them instead. Stick (Terence Stamp), her old trainer, gives her advice, and Mark Miller (Goran Visnjic) is the father in danger. The Hand, a clan of ninjas, comes after them all. Elektra is a spin-off from Daredevil, and it was supposed to launch a franchise.
Elektra has obsessive-compulsive habits in this version, lining up her things and counting steps, which could have made her interesting, but the writing never does anything with it. The villains are cartoonish, with powers like turning into tattoos, and the fights lack any real energy whatsoever. Garner has said in interviews that she regrets doing it, and Marvel stayed away from the character for years.
4
‘The Last Airbender’ (2010)
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Image via Paramount Pictures</figure>
Aang (Noah Ringer), the last of the Air Nomads, has to learn to control all four elements and stop the Fire Nation. Ringer is a real taekwondo black belt, and you can tell the filmmakers wanted martial arts to carry the movie. Zuko (Dev Patel) tries to capture Aang, and Katara (Nicola Peltz) and Sokka (Jackson Rathbone) travel with him. The Last Airbender was written and directed by M. Night Shyamalan, his first film adapted from someone else’s work.
The bending is the biggest letdown. In the cartoon, one waterbender can move rivers, but in the film, it takes several people doing slow, complicated dance moves just to push a little water around. Firebenders can’t create flames and need a nearby torch to use their powers. The show’s creators distanced themselves from it, and critics scored it in the single digits on Rotten Tomatoes.
3
‘Max Steel’ (2016)
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Image via Open Road Films</figure>
Max McGrath (Ben Winchell) is a teenager whose body gives off strange energy, and he teams up with an alien named Steel (voiced by Josh Brener) to fight villains who want to steal that power. Maria Bello plays his mother, Molly, and Andy Garcia plays Miles Edwards, a scientist with a secret. Max Steel is based on a Mattel toy line, and it was filmed in 2013 but sat on the shelf until 2016.
Steel looks like a cheap CGI blob, and the story takes a long time to get to anything resembling action. When it finally came out, it flopped, and critics said it felt like a movie made to sell action figures. Garcia and Bello are both far better than the material, which makes it all the more puzzling that they signed on.
2
‘Dragonball Evolution’ (2009)
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Image via 20th Century Fox</figure>
Goku (Justin Chatwin) is a high school student in an American town who has to find the seven Dragon Balls before Lord Piccolo (James Marsters) does. Master Roshi (Chow Yun-fat) trains him, Bulma (Emmy Rossum) helps with the search, and Chi-Chi (Jamie Chung) is his crush. Dragonball Evolution takes a beloved Japanese anime and turns it into a play like a teen movie.
Akira Toriyama, who created the original manga, said he was disappointed with the film and felt it wasn’t really Dragon Ball. The screenwriter, Ben Ramsey, apologized to fans years later and admitted he’d made a mess of it. Fans of the series still bring it up as a warning about what happens when Hollywood doesn’t understand its source material.
1
‘BloodRayne’ (2005)
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Image via Boll KG Productions</figure>
Rayne (Kristanna Loken), a half-human, half-vampire, hunts the vampire king Kagan (Ben Kingsley) across eighteenth-century Romania. Katarin (Michelle Rodriguez) and Vladimir (Michael Madsen) help her along the way, and Billy Zane and Meat Loaf both show up in supporting roles. BloodRayne is based on a video game, and it was directed by Uwe Boll, a German filmmaker famous for adapting games into movies that critics hate.
Boll was so disliked that, in 2006, he challenged critics to boxing matches, and actually fought several of them in a ring. Kingsley, who won an Oscar for Gandhi, looks lost throughout, and the dialogue gives everyone a hard time. The fight scenes are dull, the blood looks fake, and the story drags. It sits at the bottom of the list because it manages to waste its cast, its budget, and its source material all at once.
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