77. Showgirls (1995)
Paul Verhoeven, one of the all time great directors was on a role since moving to Hollywood. With RoboCop, Total Recall and Basic Instinct under his belt, Showgirls was expected to be equally as successful. Starring Saved By The Bell sex kitten Elizabeth Berkley, she played Nomi Malone, a girl who dreams about being a Las Vegas showgirl. What follows is lots of nudity, sex and other Verhoeven-type depravity. People complained about the film's attitude towards women and general sexist tone. Although not as bad as people say, it is pure Verhoeven but not as watchable as his other films, if the script was a little more finely tuned, perhaps things might have been different. Recently some people including Quentin Tarantino have come out and defended the film but British film critic Mark Kermode probably sums it up best;
"If Showgirls had any appeal at all, it was that it was so spectacularly vulgar and crude, I still think it's just rubbish, and I like Paul Verhoeven."
76. Star Trek: Insurrection
The crew of The Next Generation were not like the crew from the Original Series. They were more about actual diplomacy rather than the cowboy verity favored by Kirk and Co. In other words, The TNG style made great TV but the original crew were better suited for action and therefore their jump to feature films was much more comfortable. However, Star Trek: First Contact managed to show that the TNG crew could make an action packed film that would appeal to hardcore fans of the TV show and the casual cinema audience. The formula had been cracked. But rather than build on the success of First Contact, Star Trek Insurrection was a step back. Not a bad film by any means but the problem was that it would have been better as a two-part TV episode. Insurrection's pedestrian pace and themes of eternal youth were a world apart from the roller coaster ride that made First Contact so much fun. In many ways it is the quintessential TNG movie but that is also the issue.
75. Quantum Of Solace (2009)
Casino Royale was a brilliant film and cemented Daniel Craig as the new Bond. But where that film was an awesome update to a franchise that was starting to go stale, Quantum Of Solace failed to build on the momentum. A script was left unrefined by another Writer's Guild strike, the finished product didn't feel like a Bond film but more of a generic action-thriller. Craig carried the film as much as he could but the whole experience was best described as an extended yawn. And all the best Bond films are defined by their villain and Quantum's Dominic Greene, the environmental businessman was bland as they come; and bland best describes this film. It also turns out Craig had to jump in a rewrite some of the scenes while they were filming as he recalled in an interview with Time Out Magazine;
On Quantum, we were fucked. We had the bare bones of a script and then there was a writers strike and there was nothing we could do. We couldn't employ a writer to finish it. I say to myself, Never again, but who knows? There was me trying to rewrite scenes and a writer I am not. Me and the director were the ones allowed to do it. The rules were that you couldn't employ anyone as a writer, but the actor and director could work on scenes together. We were stuffed. We got away with it, but only just. It was never meant to be as much of a sequel as it was, but it ended up being a sequel, starting where the last one finished.
74. Masters Of The Universe (1987)
If you were a boy growing up in the 80s, you probably wanted to be He-Man and you would have rushed to the cinema to see the live action movie starring the wooden Dolph Lundgren. But you would also have been disappointed by the crap you was presented with and the total disregard for the source material. Staple characters like Orco and Battle Cat are missing and not even mentioned, in their place we get a locksmith dwarf called Gwildor and a young Courteney Cox and Star Trek Voyager's Robert Duncan McNeill. But one of the more unforgivable aspects of the film version is that it completely got rid of the one thing that never got boring in the cartoon, the one thing every He-Man fan looked forward to, the transformation from Prince Adam to He-Man. Why this was left out is beyond me and made the film that much more painful to watch. The one good thing in the film is Frank Langella as Skeletor. Not only does he have the best lines but Langella does an awesome job of bringing Skeletor to life. It's just a shame the rest of the film was pants. And what was with everyone saying "Good journey" all the time? That was never in the cartoon!
73. V For Vendetta
Even though the Wachowski's didn't direct V For Vendetta, they did write the screenplay and produce it, that is why it was trailed and sold as their follow-up project after The Matrix. Based on the Alan Moore comic, Natalie Portman plays Evey Hammond who lives in a futuristic and fascist Great Britain. After being saved by V, a mysterious man in a Guy Fawkes mask, their lives become intertwined and Hammond decides to help V bring down the government that has turned Britain into the state it is. When Alan Moore removed his support for the film, it wasn't news that surprised or shocked anyone. Putting aside the lies told by producer Joel Silver that Alan Moore had given his backing to the film, Mr Moore has never been the most accommodating man when it comes to adaptations of his work but he might have been on to something. A poor script with pretentious dialogue and a filtered plot that turned the themes of the story into a manifesto written by a protester sitting in a tent outside a bank, V For Vendetta should have been called B For Boring. Portman's acting was ridiculed and the film was dismissed as a mess. To be fair, it was never going to be easy to bring Alan Moore's book to the big screen but that is what they said about Watchmen and Zack Snyder managed to pull it off .