10 Awful Movies With Just One Great Character
Tom Hardy has never worked so hard...
For a film to be a success, you need to spin a lot of plates at the same time. You need a good script, a good story, good characters, a good world for them to live in and good performances behind the writing. If you fail in any of those respects, you can never really hope to capture true greatness.
Now, it can be the case that films can be good despite missing a couple of beats, but for the most part, if you fail on multiple accounts, you've got yourself a turd or a turkey. And once something is painted as bad, audiences tend to paint every individual part of it as such. If a movie is bad, it's characters are usually classified as such and everyone moves on.
But it's not always the case and sometimes great characters can find themselves lost in a prison of a terrible movie. Unfortunately for them, they're usually destined to be forgotten, but they arguably deserve even more praise for resisting the tide. And in some cases, they even manage to single-handedly drag a bad film to some sort of success.
Whatever the case, these diamonds in the rough deserved a whole lot better...
10. Magneto - Dark Phoenix
Given how difficult the production process apparently was for Simon Kinberg's Dark Phoenix, it might feel a little like kicking a film when it's down by criticising the sequel too much. But then, it's an objectively disappointing experience whose heavy rewrites, lack of internal logic and poor character decisions show very obviously.
Its worst crime is arguably taking a group of great characters and either sucking all of the joy out of them or leading them in new directions that either make no sense or are outright betrayals of the character. Which is definitely the case with Professor Xavier.
But the one thing you cannot take away from the film is that it includes a great Magneto performance by Michael Fassbender and a great spin on the character. Rather than the well-worn Mutant Supremacist track, we get a retired Erik trying to live in peace in his mutant sanctuary who is unwillingly drawn back into vengeance by the murder of his friend. In a nonsensical slog of a movie his arc is the only interesting thing.