8. The Terminal (2004)
While certainly well-intentioned, and endearing on a certain level, this Tom Hanks comedy about a baffled immigrant who is forced to live at JFK Airport because of political turmoil that dissolved his native country while he was en route was thin, bland, and obvious. Spielberg’s point about America being a wonderland and a melting pot isn’t wrong, but he makes it in a saccharine — bordering on cloying — way.
7. Empire of the Sun (1987)
Again: not a horrible movie but still a major disappointment. Loose, meandering, and soporific, this early Christian Bale film combined several of Spielberg’s favorite themes (WW II, childhood, airplanes) in a stiff, would-be epic about a British boy separated from his parents in Shanghai after the Japanese invade. Atmosphere and the exotic setting supersede all else as young Jim (played by a 12-year-old Bale) learns to get along at an internment camp where a rascally American (John Malkovich) teaches him the ropes.
6. Lincoln (2012)
Daniel Day Lewis’s strangely captivating performance fails to rescue the film from feeling airless and procedural. Veering from highly improbable and dramatically clunky (would ordinary soldiers from the battlefield really chat so familiarly, and dismissively, with the commander-in-chief, as they do at the start of the film?) to shouty (Tommy Lee Jones’s performance), this snail-paced work was like watching 50 pages of the Congressional Record come to life.
5. 1941 (1979)
Spielberg’s first flop, a huge money loser that was meant to be Universal’s big Christmas entry for 1979, had an amusing premise (an overestimation of Japanese military capabilities that led to fears that bombings would reach all the way to the American mainland). But this loud, wearying, only intermittently funny film starring John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd as troops sent into a tizzy by the attack on Pearl Harbor fell awkwardly between action spectacle and slapstick comedy. The goal seemingly was to spend as much money as possible rather than to tell a coherent story.
4. The Color Purple (1985)
A shameless piece of weepy, four-handkerchief Oscar-mongering, this period piece that takes place over 40 years in Georgia was a transparent attempt for Spielberg to be taken seriously. Instead of earning that, he wallowed in cliches about abusive black men and passive but enduring black women. Whoopi Goldberg and Oprah Winfrey made their mark, though.
3. Amistad (1997)
Anthony Hopkins’ off-putting performance as John Qunicy Adams is the least of the film’s problems. Another lumbering historical message picture, this time about a slave uprising aboard a ship that landed near New Haven, Connecticut, in 1839 and resulted in murder trials for the slaves. The movie could have been trimmed by an hour.
The legal case was fascinating, and the moral stakes could hardly have been higher, but Spielberg bludgeons all the life out of the case and practically shouts all of his points.
Spielberg’s preachy side led him to make poor use of Morgan Freeman and Matthew McConaughey (though not of Djimon Hounsou, who effortlessly inhabited his part as the leader of the uprising and should have received an Oscar nomination). The climactic courtroom scene, in which Adams pleads for the slaves’ lives at the Supreme Court, not only bears little resemblance to what actually occurred but comes across as playing to the cheap seats.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jnl6WlEjQWQ
2. The Adventures of Tintin (2011)
The lifeless and weird motion-capture animation makes the film unengaging on even the most basic level, but the crusty, old-fashioned slapstick humor, the insistently cardboard characters and the tiresome and convoluted boy-detective plot make the film worse than interminable and close to excruciating.
1. Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008)
Could Indy 4 be the most disappointing film ever made, even considering that the previous two installments fell well short of the standard set by Raiders of the Lost Ark? Discuss.
Likewise: Who was more annoying, Shia LaBeouf or Cate Blanchett? Could the mushroom-cloud ending have been any more wrong?
Certainly George Lucas bears much, if not most, of the responsibility for this bizarre, ridiculous campy and heartbreaking desecration of the legacy of Indiana Jones. But Spielberg directed it, and we should never let him live it down.
*****
image illustration via here
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