Bad Movies With Good Premises

There's something uniquely painful about watching a film that should have been great and thinking to yourself "how did they mess this up?" This feeling only grows more intense when you stop to consider the millions, if not hundreds of millions, of dollars they cost to produce. That's a lot of money down the pipes, and it should've resulted in some legendary movies. 

Great ideas get lost under bad execution in Hollywood more often than we'd like to think, and it can happen for any number of reasons. Maybe a director with too much power got carried away in pursuit of their vision, or a screenwriter couldn't handle the concept, or a studio meddled too much and sullied a great idea — whatever the reason, these movies all have one thing in common: they blew it. If a film's basic idea is a fresh glass of milk, then these movies spilled it all over the carpet. Get ready to read up on some of the worst movies with the best premises.

On the surface, Sucker Punch is a movie about girls using their imaginations to stave off insanity while they organize an escape from a mental asylum. Underneath that intriguing facade, however, it's actually just two hours of Zack Snyder ordering nubile actresses to prance around attractive, yet hollow, CGI environments. There's no doubt that the movie's core concept is interesting; it's a premise that's brimming with tension, agony, and intensity. Yet it fails to capitalize on these three key ingredients and instead resorts to playing up its impressive CGI spectacle — and its female leads' skimpy outfits.

While exploitation films can be entertaining and definitely serve a purpose in cinema, Sucker Punch shouldn't have been one, for two reasons: first, it's PG-13, meaning it likely never had enough leeway to do what Snyder seemed to want. Second, it shouldn't have relied on its sexy aspects to carry such a sharp premise. Had Sucker Punch invested any actual character development in its leads, they would've been so much more than curvaceous cardboard cutouts. The girls' imagination sequences, which include fights against giant samurais, zombie Nazis, and dragons, would've had so much more impact. Instead, all we got was a painfully shallow, disturbingly dismal two-hour lingerie commercial stuffed to the gills with top-of-the-line special effects.

This film is easily one of the saddest examples of a bad movie with a good premise. Warner Bros. took their coolest idea ever, Batman going up against Superman, and ruined it. It was perfectly simple: take the two biggest, most iconic superheroes in western culture and pit them against each other. It should've been glorious... but thanks to shallow writing and an misguidedly dark tone, it wasn't.

Most of the movie's problems go back to the weak screenplay. The first act of the movie is near flawless, but when Batman's dodgy motivations for acting like an angry teenager come into play, the movie starts to fall apart. Instead of having Lex Luthor overtly manipulate the world's dumbest genius, Bruce Wayne, why not have Luthor genuinely aid him in his crusade against Supes via a team-up between Wayne Enterprises and Lex Corp.? That could've easily led to a proper Batman/Superman showdown — one that didn't revolve around both heroes stubbornly refusing to talk out their differences until one shouted his mom's name. And what was up with Lex kidnapping Superman's mother in the first place, all while he flaunted pictures of her gagged, bound, and crying? C'mon, that's just dark, especially for a movie about caped superheroes. Yeesh.

The Purge franchise has developed into one of the more interesting film series going, but its first installment was a disappointing initial step. The first movie's simple premise of "what if people had one night to commit any crime they wanted" was simple, elegant, and brimming with promise. Unfortunately, the original Purge squandered that rich concept by confining its action to a single residence. It took a horror premise with infinite potential and boiled it down to a standard home invasion film. Worse yet, it was a mediocre jumpscare-fest filled with two-dimensional characters, only barely carried by a solid performance from Ethan Hawke.

Thankfully, for all of The Purge's flaws, its sequels made leaps and bounds of progress when it came to capitalizing on that core concept's potential. Both The Purge: Anarchy and The Purge: Election Year greatly improved upon the first Purge, taking the action out onto the streets so viewers could see the true scope. In that respect, the series has evolved and at least partially made good on its promise over time.

Aiming for a semi-faithful adaptation of the epic Nickelodeon cartoon series Avatar: The Last Airbender, the film version was ever only going to be about one thing: a child, saddled with the avatar spirit, who must accept his destiny and commit himself to a life of mastering control over nature's elements in order to combat evil. It's a simple premise, but it packs a wealth of rich, mythological, fantasy-imbued classicalism. While the cartoon captured this idea's essence perfectly, the movie utterly failed.

The live-action Avatar adaptation surrounds its central premise with such atrocious execution that one can't help but be distracted by the cinematic schlock that obfuscates an otherwise innocent, earnest core. The Last Airbender's cast of child actors, while well-intentioned, are absolutely abysmal and almost single-handedly tank the film, although they're spared the full blame thanks to director M. Night Shyamalan's misguided efforts. Shyamalan, who also wrote the movie, filled The Last Airbender with robotic dialogue, paced it at a speed that'd make pouring molasses seem exciting, and neglected to inject even an ounce of the source material's fantastical, self-aware humor, all of which resulted in an overall disaster of a film.

What do aliens, indestructible refrigerators, and Shia LaBeouf have in common? They're all in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, also known as the one Indiana Jones movie most people prefer to forget. The general distaste for this movie is completely justified — what business does a UFO have in an Indiana Jones adventure? While fantasy has always been an element of the series, this tedious entry nosedived Indy through some straight-up sci-fi schlock.

It's a shame the movie panned out the way it did, as the core premise was pretty solid: an aging Indiana Jones goes up against the Soviets during the Red Scare era. Couple that setup with a solid throughline revolving around Indy and Marion's son, and you've got the recipe for a pretty solid Indiana Jones sequel. Too bad the film seemed disinterested in itself, and left viewers feeling like unwanted passengers strapped along for a chore of a ride. Throw that pervasive sense of exhaustion on top of the nonsensical plot, and you're left with a good premise trapped inside a bad movie. Hopefully the next one's better.