4. Dr. Alan Grant - The Lost World: Jurassic Park
Even though it was incredibly forward thinking with its effects, Jurassic Park was a very old fashioned blockbuster. Nowhere was this more apparent than with its protagonist. Todays movies may be populated with young, cocksure heroes but in the olden days of the nineties we were treated to more mature, but equally flawed heroes who were (gasp) identifiable from each other. Because Sam ONeill didn't want to return for a sequel Alan Grant sat the next one out, letting Jeff Goldblum take the... uh... lead. The Lost World just wasn't as fun as the original (although many of its criticised logic gaps are just as bad as what happened in the first), but there was still money in dinosaurs and as his career hadn't exploded as expected O'Neill decided to return to the Islas for the third one. But while Alan Grant was back in name, he wasn't really in character. The Lost World had already had him turned into a sell-out (apparently Malcolm was the only one who couldn't be paid to keep quiet) but in III he was not really differentiable from any other action hero. This was only emphasised with Joe Johnston creating a young, cocksure apprentice for him; the dinos were still cool, but the characters were far from fresh.