10 Films That Took Themselves Way Too Seriously
Who wants to see Arnie playing it straight, anyway?
To nobody’s great surprise, Paul Verhoeven recently professed himself unimpressed with the remakes of Total Recall and Robocop, claiming they missed the light tone of the original films.
“They take these somewhat absurd stories and make them much too serious. I think that is a mistake,” the filmmaker said. “Both those movies needed the distance of satire or comedy to situate it for audiences. Playing it straight without any humour is a problem and not an improvement.”
Humour has recently been in short supply at the multiplex, with any superhero movie that wasn’t Deadpool loaded with dark introspection, lots of growling and not much else. Most other pictures seem to have been made with a “no jokes” policy, lest audiences start to loosen up and start enjoying themselves.
Not every movie could be improved with a few jokes, but in the case of the following, they sure wouldn’t have gone amiss.
10. Maggie
Arnold Schwarzenegger finally gets a zombie movie with Maggie, and it’s everything you’d expect, with loads of action, explosions and a bit where Arnie shoots his zombie wife in the wife and says, “Consider that a divorce.”
Nah, just kidding. So listless that it might be an episode of Fear The Walking Dead under another name, Maggie consists of Arnie moping about while his daughter (Abigail Breslin) slowly succumbs to infection after being bitten. Just like FTWD, it’s basically a zombie story for people who’ve never watched a zombie movie in their lives.
Which begs the question: why cast Arnie? The last thing you expect from the Terminator, particularly at this stage of his career, is a bit of “serious” acting in a movie that goes nowhere fast. What next? A dark, introspective alien invasion movie starring Chuck Norris?