10 Bad Films By Great Directors

Not the most obvious Oliver Stone effort (that would be his disastrous historical epic, Alexander) but definitely the most disappointing one, especially so considering it came in the ten-year period where Oliver Stone had his finger on the pulse of America like no director before or since. Salvador, Platoon, Wall Street, Born on the Fourth of July, JFK, Nixon—here Stone charted the American experience in all its despair, tracing the events with a disillusioned soldier's eye (Stone himself fought in Vietnam).

It's a shame then, that his biopic of Doors front-man Jim Morrison fails to live up to the rest of those films. As with most of the films on this list, there are some fine moments (Val Kilmer's performance as Morrison in particular), and the concert scenes are truly electrifying.

Elsewhere though, the film wades in intellectual myopia, creating a mysticism around Jim that backs up some of the more tired cliche's of the Morrison legend—the sequence of him taking peyote in the desert is one of the most self-serving passages of film ever shot.

To be fair to Stone, this was made in the same year (!) as JFK—a film now rightly being reconsidered as a masterpiece—and much of his effort must've gone into making that. But The Doors fails regardless, standing as one of Oliver Stone's firebrand, maverick misfires.