10 Real Reasons Behind Annoying Movie Moments
9. Frank's Old-Man Beating - The Irishman
And for a movie of almost entirely inverse quality now, we have Martin Scorsese's masterful The Irishman.
As superb as the epic crime drama might be, it's constantly dunked on for a single unfortunate scene, in which a 30-something Frank Sheeran (Robert De Niro) unconvincingly beats a shopkeeper up for shoving his daughter.
A big fuss was made pre-release about the movie's digital de-aging technology, which is used throughout the film to have De Niro, Al Pacino, and Joe Pesci play decades-younger versions of themselves.
For the most part it works incredibly well, but there's no denying how the illusion breaks down completely in this scene, even if the problem is often incorrectly ascribed to "bad CGI."
In reality, the real issue is that Scorsese opted to have De Niro perform all of the de-aged scenes himself rather than use a double for the sequences involving a markedly younger Frank.
As such, it's clear we're looking at a 70-something man quite limply pretending to assault someone, rather than an individual at their physical peak brutally beating them.
This could've been mitigated fairly easily by using a body double, especially as the shot is filmed relatively wide and digitally superimposing De Niro's face onto the double would've been quite simple.
Had Scorsese adopted this approach, he could've avoided this scene becoming a rather obnoxious, out-of-context meme online.