10 Famous Directors Who Completely Changed Style For One Movie

If you thought pairing the director of The Godfather with the actor from Mrs. Doubtfire would cause an eruption in the space time continuum and blow up the world from within, you were probably a little underwhelmed with the final result.

Jack is a coming-of-age comedy with a twist: The titular boy, played by Robin Williams with all the subtlety of a brick to the face, suffers from Werner syndrome, which causes him to age four times faster than normal. The film is essentially a two-hour long excuse for Williams to indulge every manic, childish whimsy he was forced to leave out of Mork & Mindy.

Coppola, the man behind such violent and harrowing fare as Apocalypse Now and Patton, had occasionally ventured into other genres with great success - most famously The Outsiders and Rumble Fish, a pair of teen dramas based on S.E. Hinton novels - but he remained an auteur even when he stepped out of his usual territory.

That's not the case with Jack, which borrows everything but the heart and soul from Big, resulting in a pretty tepid comedy.