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IIt’s rare that a movie truly deserves to be called “perfect.”
While the term is overused in the film world, how many films actually manage to last two hours without a single questionable beat? Not too much.
Even great movies sometimes have a scene that doesn’t quite ring true, or a subplot that makes your attention wander a little.
By Star Wars: A new hope to Martin Scorsese The Irishmanthere are plenty of great films that could have almost been derailed by one bum note.
See below for The independent‘s list of 11 bad scenes that almost jeopardized otherwise brilliant films.
You can also click here to read The independent‘s list of 23 Secretly Great Performances in Otherwise Bad Movies.
Klaverveldlaan 10
For the vast majority of the term Klaverveldlaan 10 is a taut, gripping psychological thriller, starring Mary Elizabeth Winstead as a young woman trapped in an underground bunker with John Goodman and John Gallagher Jr.. Although she is told that the world above has been decimated by an alien attack, we never know whether Goodman’s sinister bunker dweller tells the truth. Until the end, when the film suddenly turns into a downright disaster film. Nevertheless, it’s a good watch, but one that is almost derailed by the unnecessarily literal ending.
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Mary Elizabeth Winstead in ’10 Cloverfield Lane’ (Paramount Photos)
American sniper
Okay, the problems with American sniper go deeper than just one boring scene. But for all its questionable politics, Clint Eastwood’s 2014 war drama was a slick, well-made film – with one shockingly amateurish moment. The scene, in which Bradley Cooper and Sienna Miller talk while holding a transparent, unmistakably fake baby, was widely ridiculed and memed when the film was released.
Django unleashed
Django unleashed is a film with some truly remarkable performances. There’s Christoph Waltz’s bounty hunter dentist (a role that won him a second Oscar), Leonardo DiCaprio’s loathsome Calvin Candy and, at the center of it all, a rarely better Jamie Foxx. But there is one clear black sheep among the cast: Quentin Tarantino himself, who plays an Australian slave trader. The director is terrible – so terrible, in fact, that if he had been on screen for longer than his brief appearance, the entire film would have been compromised.
Jurassic Park III
While it was clearly never going to be a patch on the original, Jurassic Park III was a thoroughly enjoyable dinosaur romp that brings all three together Jurassic world movies to shame. Except, remember the scene with the talking velociraptor? It turned out to be a dream sequence, of course, but the brief moment of dino talkativeness was so goofy that you couldn’t help but be taken out of the experience.
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Téa Leoni and William H Macy in ‘Jurassic Park III’ (Universal)
Kingsman: The Secret Service
There was something left King’s man that really struck a chord with viewers; the bombastic, far-fetched spin on the spy genre seemed to evoke a bygone era of James Bond. The entire film leaned heavily on comedy, but the very last scene – featuring a crude joke about anal sex – left many with a sour taste in their mouths.
Licorice pizza
The latest film from There will be blood maestro Paul Thomas Anderson proved quite divisive; for some it was pure work of genius, for others an uncomfortable confirmation of an inappropriate relationship. However, there was one thing that almost everyone agreed on. A scene in which John Michael Higgins, as a white restaurateur, spoke to his wife in a grotesquely caricatured Japanese accent – intended as a lighthearted anti-racist satire – landed like a lead balloon and turned some viewers off the film entirely.
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Alana Haim in ‘Licorice Pizza’ (Universal)
Let the right one in
Scandinavian coming-of-age horror Let the right one in featured some pretty impressive visual effects in many of its scenes – with one notable exception. A scene in which Virginia (Ika Nord) is attacked by a room full of cats is rendered with such shaky CGI that the whole thing comes across as an absurd, tasteless comedy. Fortunately, it doesn’t detract from the rest of the film, which endures as a creepy delight.
Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King
The return of the king was an undeniably great epic, filled with memorable set pieces and moments of true fantasy awesomeness. But the last half hour? I’m not so sure. The film’s schmaltzy epilogue was five times too long and dramatically inert – the scene where Frodo lies in bed and greets his comrades one by one is enough to make even the most loyal Tolkien head check his wristwatch.
Star Wars
The reissue of the 1997 Special Edition of Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hopequickly became infamous among the franchise’s core fans thanks to one scene in particular. With just one minor editing change, George Lucas stopped Han Solo (Harrison Ford) from shooting the evil alien Greedo before he could shoot him first. At that moment, a supposedly important piece of character building was lost. The controversial scene would kick off a feud that raged among Star Wars fans for decades.
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Greedo and Han Solo prepare to shoot each other in ‘Star Wars: A New Hope’ (Disney/Lucasfilm)
The dark knight stands up
Christopher Nolan’s sequel to the much-loved superhero thriller The Dark Knight was clearly less well received than its predecessor, and with good reason. But for most of the runtime The Dark Knight is still a riveting, spectacle-filled romp. However, the character of Talia al Ghul (Marion Cotillard) unfortunately never fully came into its own, and her lame, starring death scene elicited more laughs than gasps.
The Irishman
Martin Scorsese’s 2018 gangster elegy was a slow-burn masterpiece, reuniting the director with Robert De Niro and Joe Pesci and marking his first collaboration with Al Pacino. The actors were digitally de-aged for much of the film to portray their characters at different stages of their lives. It more or less worked – but one scene, in which an apparently youthful De Niro beats up the man who pushed his daughter, was too much for the digital effects. There’s no hiding the fact that De Niro moves and fights like a man in his mid-seventies. In a film full of great, poignant moments, this one was difficult to watch.
This article originally appeared in October 2022
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