5. Gangster Squad
There was so much promise, what with the incredible cast, and the not-so-faint whiff of The Untouchables about Ruben Fleischer's gangster ensemble, but there were far more problems with the final product than anyone could blame on the reshoots and edits made necessary by the Aurora shooting last year. Perhaps you think the film deserves a reprieve for that reason? Well, take another look: the whole grubby mess is a dumb, over-violent mistakes that fails to assert its own tone and which horribly misuses its very talented cast.
Why So Ridiculous? Gangster Squad is the least restrained movie that ever was. It is over-blown, ridiculously over-acted and over-insistent on its own cool, which is a gross misjudgement, and it was handed over to a director who is far better known for making comedies, and never quite rises above that experience. Rather than making a stylish, neo-noir gangster epic, Fleischer instead seems intent on spoofing his own film, and the tone is jarring to say the least. He also fails to direct almost all of his actors, leading to an unthinkably poor performance by Ryan Gosling, and a comically over-blown and self-indulgent grand-stand of a performance by Sean Penn, which somehow gained him plaudits despite being hammier than an actual ham. When films like Casino, Goodfellas and The Untouchables exist, for this to be 2013's addition to the gangster genre is just tragic comical.