10 Action Movies That Prove Hollywood Hates You

A good day to Die Ha-Ha-Ha-Ha.

Bruce Willis Die Hard 4
20th Century Fox

Ask anyone who’s been to their multiplex recently and they’ll tell you that 2015 is already one of the greatest times in recent years for action movies, with Mad Max: Fury Road, Furious 7 and Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation earning as much in audience goodwill as they made at the box office.

Regardless of how the rest of the year turns out, the story of 2015 will cherish their memory while excluding movies about genetically engineered hitmen, CIA agents in the 1960s or anything that starred Jai Courtney. This is a good thing.

In too many previous years, drought conditions prevailed. The choice was between a remake, a film about a Caucasian superhero with problems or a sequel to a movie based on a toy line. No offence intended to the filmmakers, but every time a movie like Transformers: Revenge Of the Fallen makes money, an angel dies and falls from Heaven.

Hollywood has always made bad action movies, but at least the failures used to be fun, especially if you were watching Gary Busey as a cop who keeps the 39 bullets his body has taken in a mason jar. Most modern train wrecks are too slick and soulless to offer anything memorable.

To follow, you will find 10 of the worst offenders, movies that aren’t bad enough, or funny enough, or dramatic enough to qualify as entertainment on any level. 

10. Fair Game

Bruce Willis Die Hard 4
Warner Bros.

Producer Joel Silver must’ve hit a rough patch between Die Hard and The Matrix because here he is attempting to make an action hero out of the person least qualified to play one – Cindy Crawford, who plays a lawyer that goes to work wearing a mini-dress.

You’d never guess that the movie was based on the same book that inspired Cobra, because apart from the plot device of a cop (William Baldwin) protecting an innocent woman, it’s a totally different film. Not a better film, necessarily, just different.

Instead of a villain called The Night Slasher we get bug-eyed Steven Berkoff, who’s trying to pull off one of those high-tech robberies that requires lots of hardware and an account in the Cayman Islands. After spending the entire film trying to kill Crawford, he eventually whisks her off to his secret hideout and explains his diabolical masterplan, then seems surprised when she turns the tables and leaves him to his doom. 

Contributor

Ian Watson is the author of 'Midnight Movie Madness', a 600+ page guide to "bad" movies from 'Reefer Madness' to 'Poultrygeist: Night of the Chicken Dead.'