4. Gore Verbinski - Live Action Disney Folklore
This is an interesting one because Gore Verbinski is the only director on this list with actual variety in his work to date. He's done zany children's comedy with Mousehunt, the road movie in The Mexican, supernatural horror with The Ring and animation with Rango. But his placement on the list is due to his direction of three Pirates of the Caribbean movies and The Lone Ranger. All of these films were produced by Jerry Bruckheimer, distributed by Disney, starred Johnny Depp and are based on legends. That's not a problem. The repetition is a problem. The second and third Pirates films are notorious because they don't actually feature a coherent story and it all wraps up in a very, "well, we didn't really know what else to do" sort of way. The Lone Ranger is just the Pirates films set in the declining Wild West era: Johnny Depp is an addle minded anti-hero who helps a ruggedly good looking hero save the day in the name of justice and a woman. It gets old; it gets boring. Verbinski's greatest film to date is Rango, an animated Western featuring a talking chameleon and a town of critters, each with their own tic and oddity. It's a children's movie, but it's also for adults. It makes perfect use of Depp's eccentric presence and it's got Timothy Olyphant as an animated Clint Eastwood (that's a nod not only to Eastwood's Western persona, but also to Olyphant's days on one of the greatest shows of all time, Deadwood). This one's simple, Verbinski: return to animation. Nurture your style here and you will be pleased, as will we all.