4. Brian De Palma
The Five Awful Movies: Snake Eyes, Mission To Mars, Femme Fatale, The Black Dahlia, Redacted Hitchcock-wannabe Brian De Palma's strengths have always been in the visual aspects of his movies, which works wonders when he's got a good script to work with. Failing that, the results are invariably the same: a good-looking movie that nobody wants to watch, because it's boring as hell. Even the manic presence of Nicolas Cage couldn't save Snake Eyes. And how the hell did De Palma make the act of looking at Scarlett Johansson boring in hus impenetrable period thriller
The Black Dahlia? De Palma has become notoriously good at finding bad scripts, it seems. Fact is, this director has spent much of his career making both good, bad and plainly average movies, but usually they came at us in an order that still showed De Palma has a man of talented. One bad movie, then a great one... maybe an average one, then a couple of great ones (I won't mention the box office disaster that was
The Bonfire of the Vanities). Nowadays, though, De Palma feels like an aged relic of the past, clinging to his wildly inconsistent filmography, diluting it with added "badness" for every modern picture that he makes.