10 Recent Movies That Let You Down INSTANTLY
These films wasted no time disappointing you.
Expectations are a funny thing, and typically define how we engage with a given film.
Sky-high expectations naturally make it difficult for an anticipated film to live up to the hype, and then there are movies everyone expected to hate that end up unexpectedly delivering the goods.
It's often said that when someone shows you who you are, you should believe them, and a similar mantra can also apply in the world of cinema.
That is to say, the first impression a film gives is usually a solid gauge of how the rest of it will turn out.
Granted, plenty of great films have slightly wobbly openings - the original Avengers movie, for example - but more often than not if it sucks out of the gate, it's best to start lowering your expectations immediately.
And these 10 recent movies all fell short of the mark within their first few minutes, confirming to even optimistic-minded audiences that they wouldn't be getting an unqualified hit.
Now, are all of these films terrible, unwatchable even? Absolutely not - a few of them might even pass for "pretty good," but each of them nevertheless assured viewers from the jump that they wouldn't be knocking it totally out of the park...
10. Captain America: Brave New World
After all the pre-release hand-wringing over poor test screenings and seemingly never-ending reshoots, Captain America: Brave New World desperately needed to come swinging out of the gate with a statement of intent to prove the nay-sayers wrong.
But the superhero sequel instead kicked off in thunderously dull fashion, bringing audiences up to speed with a recast Thunderbolt Ross - Harrison Ford taking over from the late William Hurt - while listlessly recounting the narrative of 2008's The Incredible Hulk.
And even once we shift to Sam Wilson (Anthony Mackie) and Joaquin Torres (Danny Ramirez) taking on Sidewinder's (Giancarlo Esposito) goons in Mexico, the action feels clunkily edited, slow, and just generally low-energy - hardly what anyone wants from a Captain America movie.
The first 10 minutes-or-so made it incredibly easy to believe that Brave New World had indeed been put through the post-production mangle, and that Marvel had struggled to wring much fun or interesting out of it in the process.
The rest of the film hardly dissuaded much from that notion, either.