10 Underrated Recent Movies That Deserve A Second Chance

In the internet age it can feel like movies just come and go. The online film industry is already so skewed to the pre-release, predicting plots and breaking down trailers incessantly (guilty), that when the finished product arrives it can be a fleeting epilogue. There's so many movies released each year, and most of them wind up shrugged off by audiences without a second look. Heck, everyone had moved on from Star Wars: The Force Awakens, the biggest film of the decade, after just a couple of months, an attitude that would have tanked the original.

This of course makes it hard for blockbusters to make back their increasingly ridonkulous budgets - the opening weekend can in some cases be almost half the final box office take - although the films that really suffer are those met with an upturned nose; being dismissed as average or worse can be a death sentence, destroying any hopes of long-term cult status.

Of course, with home video and streaming becoming an increasingly important part of a film's run there's always scope for rediscovery. And here's ten movies from the past few years that really deserve a second look.

I know about 50% of you are turning your nose up at this, but, really, is it distaste for Iron Man 3, or a grumble that The Mandarin wasn't as advertised. Get past Trevor Slattery and what you're left with is an as-good-as-it-could be Shane Black action comedy blockbuster, with a balance of laughs and thrills and extraneously fun Christmas setting.

Although, should The Mandarin be a sticking point anyway? It's a twist, not false advertising (this is no Jared Leto's Joker), and one that fits the tone of the movie perfectly. The racist caricature with magic rings (things that don't fit neither our own world's decency nor the semi-grounded science of the MCU), was updated to the modern villain; not a Bin Laden leader, but a petty tech CEO. That's a neat change, and in a movie hot on the heels of the oh-so epic Avengers, a send-up of that was a neat palette-cleanser.

It's not like the Mandarin is even the biggest character shift in the Iron Man mythology. That'd be Tony Stark, who was redefined massively for the big screen to be more like, well, Robert Downey Jr. People didn't mind then because Iron Man was a B-List hero few had affinity with, but something in the intervening five years meant everybody expected super faithfulness over a fun flick.