Editorials > Indie Directors who Make Crappy Mainstream Films: Part Two

Justin Lin – Annapolis

Better Luck Tomorrow was a bad film, I don't care what anyone says. Still, the mainstream film studios saw the over-the-top mix of teen violence and sexuality in Justin Lin's freshman drama and figured he might do well with a big budget, two C-list stars, and a boxing movie set in in a military academy.

The mainstream film studios were wrong.

Utterly uninvolving, Annapolis wasn't outright awful so much as it was totally forgettable; it thankfully lacked all the bombastic, unbelievable emotion and violence of Better Luck Tomorrow, but it also lacked an interesting plot, worthwhile characters, or anything that makes a film worth watching for more than five minutes. Perhaps sensing how boring Annapolis was, Lin's next film – Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift – included notably more drifting and half-naked Asian women.

Kevin Smith – Mallrats

Clerks was great because it felt indie and personal; Mallrats sucked because it tried to please everyone at once. Despite some fun monologues on superhero sex organs and some cute Jay and Silent Bob antics, Mallrats feels like a bad ripoff of a John Hughes teen comedy.

People fall in and out of love in the most cliched way possible (the film reaches its nadir when Brodie tells his girlfriend "you have my heart," to which she replies, "What can I say? I love the bastard"), the physical humor is of Rob Schneider quality, and the monologues bog the film down rather than giving it an edge (as they did in Clerks). 

And while Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, with its big budget and hilariously huge number of cameos, is actually one of Smith's better films (unlike Mallrats, Strike Back knows how to do stupid, silly physical comedy well), his other two forays into the world of the big budget left much to be desired. Dogma was far too talky for its incredibly interesting premise, and Jersey Girl fell into the same cliched traps that Mallrats did so many years earlier.

George A. Romero - Land of the Dead

As much as it pains me to bag on one of the greatest directors of all time, Land of the Dead just doesn't deliver on any front. Most unfortunately, its  political messages have none of the subtlety or narrative integration of the previous Dead films: when John Leguizamo shouts "I'm gonna go jihad on his ass," is there really any question as to who he represents?

And perhaps it's just my unlimited hatred for the undead talking, but when Romero actually wants us to root for the zombies – not a single, sympathetic zombie who wields a gun and shoots the most evil human alive, but all zombies in general – it's impossible to be afraid of them. For all Romero's irritation toward the running undead, his own main change to the zombie formula (making them intelligent) is ultimately even harder to swallow than what the Dawn of the Dead remake offered. Thinking zombies aren't zombies at all.

The film also suffers from an incredible lack of gore, considering who we're talking about: CGI blood and guts run rampant, and all the practical, gory charm of the original films is totally absent.

Still, Romero obviously hated the mainstream process enough to go almost completely off the radar for his most recent zombie flick, Diary of the Dead. Though I haven't yet seen it, initial reviews seem to suggest that though it still carries a depressingly heavy hand when it comes to its ultimate message, it shocks and entertains in a way Land couldn't have hoped to.

Neil Marshall – Doomsday?

As the film doesn't even come out for another month, it's far too soon to pass judgment on it – still, the above trailer prompted me to write this article in the first place, so perhaps it's worthy of mention.

The Descent was moody and terrifying. Dog Soldiers was goofy, gory, and fun. Doomsday looks like a mishmash of every genre movie ever made, but turned cliche and corny and uninvolving. From the remarkably humorless one-liners to the myriad of narrative and stylistic ripoffs evident in this short trailer (it seems to be Mad Max meets 28 Days Later meets Underworld meets Escape from New York).

Still, though, I can't say so definitively. It does have Bob Hoskins and Malcolm McDowell, so that's something; and perhaps the trailer was just shittily edited. Either way, I thought it might be worth bringing up.