10 Most Underwhelming Summer Movies Of All Time
Who knew that superheroes could be so camp?
Never mind what the calendar says: Hollywood defines summer as the period between Easter and October, which is how long it takes the studios to divest themselves of their high-priced blockbusters, each release spaced a week apart to avoid unnecessary bloodshed.
The irony is that the best “summer” films are typically released during the spring months, and it’s only the most crassly commercial dross that gets doled out from June onwards. In 2015, Furious 7 and Mad Max: Fury Road were released between April and May, while the June-August period gave us Terminator Genisys and Fantastic Four.
2016 is the year of Independence Day: Resurgence, Ghostbusters and Star Trek Beyond (among others), and only time will tell if they’re as good as Deadpool and Captain America: Civil War or as underwhelming as the previous year’s turkeys.
One thing’s for certain though: they can’t possibly be as bad as the following movies.
10. Armageddon
As an asteroid collides with the Earth, wiping out the dinosaurs in the process, music swells and we get a title card: “Sixty-Five Million Years Later…”
Armageddon is that corny.
Anyway, there’s another asteroid heading for Earth and the filmmakers have decided that this will be the perfect backdrop for a love story. So they import some soap opera moments from Titanic, the previous year’s box office champ, which reaches its nadir when Ben Affleck attempts to seduce Liv Tyler with animal crackers.
There are lots of soap opera moments here, all of which ring hollow (Michael Bay doesn’t “do” drama), while the forced banter between the leads tries to gloss over how ridiculous it all is, such as when 50,000 die in a Shanghai meteor shower that receives barely thirty seconds of screen time. Eddie Griffin’s jive-talkin’ bike messenger was on screen for longer, and all he did was destroy some Godzilla merchandise.