Filmmaking can be a fickle art form; a director will come out with a smash hit that quickly establishes them as a talent to be watched, but we're all familiar with the so-called "sophomore slump", in which up-and-coming filmmakers lose their footing early in their career and then never seem to regain it. We're also familiar with those master filmmakers who scored a string of classic hits early in their careers, but then seemingly lost their knack or stopped caring later on, driving their reputations into the ground in their older years. Whatever the reason, there's little more frustrating than a director who isn't consistent; at least the likes of Uwe Boll and Michael Bay are pretty consistently bad, so we know what to expect. It's a somewhat tense experience sitting down in the cinema to watch films from these 10 filmmakers, because frankly, we never know what to expect. Here are 10 directors with ridiculously inconsistent careers.
10. Robert Rodriguez
Though Robert Rodriguez's career is not as erratically up-and-down as most of the directors on this list, he's without question one of the more curiously inconsistent filmmakers working today. Rodriguez is a diverse director, and this is where his fault lies; the badass, manly, R-rated movies he's made throughout his career - El Mariachi, Desperado, From Dusk Till Dawn, Sin City, Planet Terror, Machete and Predators - have all received solid critical and audience acclaim, but it's his
other fare that doesn't put him in such good standing. Rodriguez has to date directed every film in the increasingly inane Spy Kids franchise, apparently as he wanted to make something that his kids could actually watch. While the first two weren't awful, there was still the feeling that the director was slumming it for the sake of sentiment, and not putting his directorial talents to their best use. The third and fourth Spy Kids films were, without question, absolutely horrible, along with two other kid-friendly films he made, Shorts and The Adventures of Sharkboy and Lava-Girl. It seems that for every 2 kick-ass films he makes, he decides to direct one crappy kiddie film, though thankfully, he doesn't seem to draw much attention to this fact, as I suspect many don't even know he makes these flicks.