Top 20 Good Parts of Bad Movies, Part 2

10. The Battle of Britain in Pearl Harbor (2001)

Remember in Part 1 where I unfavourably compared Passchendaele to Pearl Harbor? The time has come to talk about Pearl Harbor itself; it's a pretty bad movie. It's a sappy by-the-numbers romance with weird dialogue and the type of logic that would exist in an elementary school student's short story. The titular battle scene could've been great if it weren't for (1) the historical inaccuracies, (2) the US sailors are incompetent and helpless, (3) the audience isn't given time to get attached to the servicemen and as such won't be invested in what happens to them, and (4) much of the focus of the attack scene is given to the fictional characters whose actions are only loosely based on true events. Having said all that, the one aerial battle scene with Rafe McCawley over the English Channel is pretty good (he volunteers to join the RAF, which in real life wasn't allowed to active USAF pilots) even if it is fictional. It's an intense, thrilling scene that just goes to show that director Michael Bay can do a decent action scene every once in a while.

9. Leonardo DiCaprio in J. Edgar (2011)

It's no secret that Leonardo DiCaprio is one of this generation's best actors. But it wasn't until 2016 that he finally won the Academy Award for best actor (for The Revenant), which means that before then we got performances like this one in which he tried Oscar-baiting so hard but to no avail. DiCaprio tries so hard to go for gold – in fact one could be forgiven for thinking the word is spelled “Oscurbate” – but the film it's in just isn't interesting at all! I must confess, I found J. Edgar to be so boring that I couldn't finish it; I quit at about the 45 minute mark. And I'm not a guy who usually quits watching stuff due to boredom (I made it all they way through the Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy miniseries, for cryin' out loud!). But what do you expect when you're watching a movie about a dull long-serving bureaucrat?

And speaking of Leo DiCaprio...

8. The soundtrack to Before the Flood (2016)

I stand firmly against the commonly held misbelief that celebrities know what's best for us. Celebrities live in a completely different world from us normal folks and lead very different lifestyles than ours; they don't have to worry about the same things us commoners do and so their political advice and opinions are unrelatable at best and nakedly cynical at worst. (For example, I don't want some super-rich late-night talk show host who can afford to airlift his family to any hospital in the world to get the best medical treatment money can buy lecturing me on which political candidate will support a half-assed public healthcare service.) Additionally, celebrities certainly don't hold any moral high ground, as their never-ending stream of scandals will attest. Honestly, I could write a whole article on this topic but I'll just get to the point: Leonardo DiCaprio is not someone to lecture us on climate change. The man is notorious for his obscene overuse of private flights – which burn more fossil fuels than dozens of ordinary people will burn throughout their lives – and his affinity for hanging out with Arab royalty (ie. oil barons) on giant, diesel-guzzling luxury yachts. Apart from that, Before the Flood itself is a terrible argument. Not much scientific evidence is presented, not a single counter-viewpoint is put forth. For example, the Athabasca oil sands surface mine is shown to demonstrate how oil sand extraction is ugly and scars the landscape when in reality those mines were opened in the 1960's and 1970's and only about 10% of the Canadian oil sands are shallow enough to be mined in this way. It's pure and simple propaganda. But at least the music is nice. For all its faults, Before the Flood has one of the best soundtracks I've ever heard in a movie. The mix of ambient electronic/experimental scoring from the likes of Mogwai, Gustavo Santaolalla, and Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross sets up an organic, introspective, and cerebral atmosphere that deserved a better film. My recommendation: listen to the soundtrack, skip the movie.

7. Private Witt's death in The Thin Red Line (1998)

OK for the record, Thin Red Line isn't a terrible movie, but it is a very disappointing one. I went into it hearing that it was one of the greatest war films ever made. But what I got was an almost 3 hour snoozefest where director Terrence Malick periodically forgot he was making a war film and instead made a bunch of nonsequitur dream-like, abstract inner reflection bullcrap, the same kind of bullcrap that made Malick's The Tree of Life (2011) utterly unwatchable to me. One of the most annoying parts of Thin Red Line is this Pvt. Witt character. Played by Jim Caviezel, Witt is a frequent source of the whole shoe-gazing boredom that pervades the whole film. He's a total slacker hippie loser who makes you wonder why he ever joined the army in the first place. The only part of Thin Red Line that made me stand up, pump my fist, and shout “yeah!” was the part where Witt freakin' dies! That may sound callous of me, but unless you've seen this movie you have no idea how irritating this dude was. They even made it a heroic death too, so kudos there.

6. The possible trolling of Saving Christmas (2014)

Saving Christmas is a pretty bad movie, even by the standards of Christian movies. It's a shoddily put together load of faux-festive materialistim and weird conspiracy theories pumped full of padding in an effort to barely scrape the threshold of feature-length (79 minutes). Some of the theories put forth in this film are so out there and held together with only the thinnest of logical explanations, like how stacks of presents under the tree symbolize the skyline of New Jerusalem (because boxes are the same shape as buildings, you see). And yet, consider for a moment that perhaps none of this was ever meant to be taken seriously and that the audience is just being screwed with. What if Kirk Cameron is actually just trolling us and that this movie is really just an elaborate satire of the War on Christmas? If this is true then Kirk Cameron might just be a comedic genius the likes of which we haven't seen since Andy Kaufman himself!...or it might just be a load of crap. Who knows?

5. Jack Black as Slip in The NeverEnding Story III (1994)

I really like Jack Black. He's one of those rare actors who makes good movies better and bad movies watchable. He's pretty much the only good part of NeverEnding Story III, a sad little sequel that really had nothing to add to its series and was clearly made just to earn a quick buck. But Black's rendition of Slip, the school bully, is truly something to admire. He plays this leather-clad, monobrowed punk villain like some kind of elaborate mastermind; a combination of Kahn and Blofeld. And he clearly revels in it. Jack Black gets so into this role and has so much fun that the audience can't help but feel it too. Like Michael Ironside in Highlander II, Jack Black is in his own little world with this one and it makes for some great entertainment.

4. Meat Loaf in To Catch a Yeti (1995)

Now we get into the truly awful stuff, starting with To Catch a Yeti, a movie whose quality is pitiful even by the standards of made-for-TV children's films. The plot and characters are forgettable, all problems are solved within minutes (mostly by random chance and not any actual thinking on part of the characters), the special effects don't deserve the moniker “special”, and the acting is almost uniformly bad. The reason I say almost is because the one bright spot in the whole film is Meat Loaf's performance as Big Jake Grizzly, a grumpy big game hunter. Similar to Jack Black in NeverEnding Story III, Meat Loaf plays a riveting villain, but in this film he brings a surprising amount of intensity found nowhere else. He also gives the irritating bad guy kid his comeuppance at the end.

3. Matthew Lillard as Shaggy in Scooby-Doo (2002)

Let's face it, Shaggy is the best character in any Scooby-Doo show or movie. He's by far the most fun and most memorable of the Mystery Machine bunch. And so it's only fitting that he is the only good part of the live-action Scooby-Doo film from 2002. Matthew Lillard – who apparently watched as many episodes of the show as he could before filming began – is spot on in the role of the laid-back, lanky, cowardly slacker/jokester Shaggy. His speech and mannerisms are uncanny; if you're patient enough then the film might be worth watching just to see the Shagster brought to life. Since 2002, Lillard has gone on to play and voice Shaggy in subsequent Scooby-Doo media so I guess some lasting good came out of it. And let's not overlook the fact that if it weren't for Lillard the role likely would've gone to either Jim Carrey or Mike Myers. That fact alone is enough to earn this actor's efforts a spot on this list.

2. Al Pacino as himself in Jack and Jill (2011)

Yeah, yeah. We all knew this was coming. Who hasn't heard of Jack and Jill's legendary awfulness? Is there anyone who doesn't immediately think “disaster” when they hear of a Happy Madison comedy in which Adam Sandler plays identical twins, one of them female? (Fun fact: this is impossible because identical twins are almost always the same sex. There've been a few confirmed cases of boy/girl identical twins being born, but each time the girl is born with Turner Syndrome. I really hope that this wasn't what Jack and Jill was going for!) Apart from its stupid premise it suffers from the usual Sandler comedy problems: the humour is dumb and mean-spirited, the plot is directionless, the child characters are creepy, the tone shifts wildly between low-brow comedy and sentimental schmaltziness, and Sandler's character is an unlikable jackass who also serves as Sandler's self-insert fan fiction. But the one thing that stands out from it all is Al Pacino playing himself, giving his all in a performance where he really didn't have to. Sure it's sad to see such an accomplished actor in a film like this, but he really commits to portraying an intense version of himself who is so obsessed with acting that he's gone a little bit crazy. This affords the film a few genuinely decent gags. This includes the last spoken lines of the film, uttered by Pacino himself: “This must never be seen by anyone... All copies: destroy them!” I'd like to think this is an instruction to the audience as to what should be done with their copy of Jack and Jill.

1. Michael Chiklis as John Belushi in Wired (1989)

If you've never heard of Wired, then allow me to fill you in. Wired is a biopic of the “laughs and times” of comedian John Belushi who died of a drug overdose in 1982 at age 33. It's pretty freakin' terrible. It's a low budget, tone-deaf pile of trash that plays like a melodramatic PSA about Hollywood drug abuse. Wired offers little insight about its subject and focuses way too much on his addictions. The anti-drug stuff isn't always handled well and mostly consists of characters yelling at John to stop doing drugs. In other words, the film lectures a man who is dead. And we haven't even gotten to the part where Belushi's ghost/corpse lies screaming during his own autopsy delivered by sushi chef as John's guardian angel dances around. Yep, that happens. I could go on about how much truly awful stuff is in Wired but I'll just cut to the chase: Michael Chiklis is outrageously good in this film. He's got John Belushi's manic energy, his mannerisms, and even his appearance down to a T. He impersonates Belushi so well that it makes you a bit sad that that actual comedian isn't around any more. It's a performance that definitely deserved a better movie than this. In fact Wired was so controversial when it came out that it kind of wrecked Chiklis' career for a couple years, which is a shame. It's not his fault the movie was crap!