10 Huge Recent Movie Moments That Fell Totally Flat
These big movie moments just didn't work.
The movie moments that stick in viewers' minds are always going to be those big, epic, theatrical ones that go hard and really want you to know it.
But of course, the most pivotal scenes in any movie are also often the trickiest to pull off with the greatest potential for a calamitous backfire.
Because no matter how prepared a filmmaker might be, they just might miss the mask, in turn ensuring that a laboured-over scene falls woefully flat.
And that's certainly the case with these 10 scenes from recent movies, each of which was hugely important in the full context of the film.
But for one of many reasons, the execution just wasn't quite there. Perhaps the VFX weren't finessed enough, a certain plot twist was too obvious, a big death scene turned out unintentionally hilarious, or an ending left the audience feeling painfully short-changed.
These scenes had everything riding on them - the full weight of the movie, even - but for whatever reason, things just didn't work out in the end, and audiences were simply baffled or perhaps even accidentally amused by what they saw...
10. Lilith Becomes Firehawk - Borderlands
Eli Roth's risible Borderlands adaptation climaxes with hero Lilith (Cate Blanchett) revealing that she's actually the Firehawk - an ancient being with godlike abilities.
In this case, it allows her to sprout fiery wings and kick plenty of ass, except the moment ends up failing to thrill because the VFX are not that great to say the least.
Lilith's transformation sequence looks initially passable, but the fire-wings themselves basically look like phone filters awkwardly slapped onto footage of Cate Blanchett inexplicably gliding through the air.
For a $120 million production, it looks unacceptably gaudy and garish.
Even accepting that fans of the games were likely waiting impatiently for the reveal that Firehawk is Lilith rather than Tiny Tina (Ariana Greenblatt), it wasn't exactly tough for non-gamers to figure out the "twist" either, given that one of the trailers freely showed the "money shot" of Lilith baring fire-wings.