I think most people underestimate just how many films in existence have been based off of comics. The list is rather extensive, even just for the English language ones.

I am not talking about the good ones either. This blog is for the ones that sucked. The ones that were either all around bad or just didn’t capture their parent source correctly.

This is for the ones that FAILED.

If I tried to discuss all of them, or went into TV movies, God forbid, we’d be here all day (and I really don’t want to review the Hoff as Nick Fury). So here is my short list.
 

Captain American (1990)

A new Captain America is in the works and they are still looking for actors, but this 1990 film was something truly special. I recommend watching That Guy With The Glasses and his Nostalgia Critic review of the film to really understand.

Like many comic book movies, this one takes a good many liberties with the original comic’s storyline, but to its credit it is still about Steve Rogers becoming Captain America during World War II. Red Skull is even his main villain.

Cap is frozen during a mission but is revived in present day just in time to save the President of the United States, who also happens to be a boy who idolized Cap back in the ‘40s.

It’s cheesy, the costume is…okay, technically it’s perfect, but still ridiculous, and they use every cliché in the book.

Those clichés are pushed to the extreme when Cap uses his shield to send the Red Skull hurtling off a cliff, preventing the villain from detonating a bomb, and then before the Red Skull’s daughter can in turn kill Cap, she is then decapitated by his returning shield from behind.

Without watching it, the actual amount of cheese is hard to explain, but trust me. We better hope the new movie is nothing like this one.
 

Daredevil & Elektra (2003 & 2005)

These are getting paired together for obvious reasons, mostly because I never actually saw Elektra, but was told by numerous people to consider that a good thing.

I actually liked some of Daredevil. I think if there had been an extra twenty minutes in there, they might have been able to work it into something good.

We have the blind lawyer, Jack Murdock, who is actually not so much blind as chemically enhanced after a childhood accident to see things in a unique way. Pledging vengeance in the name of his father against the evil crime boss, the Kingpin, and all scumbags of Hell’s Kitchen, Jack becomes the vigilante Daredevil.

What made this interested initially was that Daredevil was more of a Batman-like figure, more brutal, and yet almost to an unhealthy extreme because he didn’t have any mercy either, and it was clearly tearing him slowly apart to live the double life.

Enter Elektra Natchios to get the plot moving with her father getting mixed up with the villain, and Bullseye being dispatched by the Kingpin to take Daredevil down.

I adored aspects of Bullseye. Mostly the scene on the plane where he aptly propels a peanut into an annoying old woman’s throat and chokes her to death. But it was all over too soon without a lot of real satisfaction.

And yeah, it was Ben Affleck. But I don’t think it had to be that bad. I think it could have been great if they had given it more attention then just, oh, another comic book movie.

Did Elektra even have a plot? Let’s just say no and slap them on the wrist for even attempting to make a spinoff movie of a film that didn’t even do well on its own.
 

The Hulk (2003)

Again, I actually really liked most of this film…up until the last thirty minutes or more when it just dragged on. Okay, so it messed with the actual Hulk plot and had baby Bruce Banner as a test subject, instead of it just being a Gama radiation accident for the adult scientist, but the cinematography was some of the most inventive I have ever seen.

No comic book movie to date has impressed me as much because of how effective the moving comic book panel shots worked for a comic book film. Sadly, this movie failed anyway.

We had the usual story, Bruce as Hulk is on the run because he is too destructive, but then they had to throw in this father plot that for me really ruined the film. All it really did was give him a villain he could physically fight, but it seemed disjointed from the rest of the movie.

There was also the whole baby face aspect of the Hulk visually that most people thought looked silly, used as a ploy to make him more relatable.

The newer version that came out in 2008 was much truer to form. It was a ‘joining the story already in progress’ idea, after Bruce was the Hulk and already on the run.

Truer to the comic origins, this film had Hulk actually acting like the Hulk, and gave him a real villain to fight.

Never before have we had an example of why a comic book movie sucks even more than originally thought of because the next crew did it so much better.

The ironic thing, however, is that they actually didn’t do all that differently in the box office.
 

Catwoman (2004)

I barely even need to touch this one. Everyone knows it sucked. It wasn’t even really Catwoman since it was about this chick Patience Phillips, not Selina Kyle.

The origins story was messed up with some cat spirit thing, and no one even cared about the plot. The only redeeming quality was that it was visually appealing to see how they computerized Halle Berry to move in that costume like a cat.

If you’re going to do a comic book movie, make it about the actual comic. Please.
 

Wanted (2008)

Wanted was actually an okay movie, but not true to its source. Unlike my other examples so far, Wanted is a single volume completed comic story. Easy to adapt, one would think, because everything is laid out for you.

I admittedly had trouble with the comic initially because the main character’s design was so obviously based off of Eminem, but at least they strayed from that in the movie. I liked that part. I did not like that they cut out the crux of the comic’s story.

The Wanted comic is about a pussy, just like in the film, who learns something surprising about his father, just like in the film, and then becomes a total badass, just like in the film. The difference is that his father was not part of some secret assassin group killing off baddies for the good of mankind.

He was a villain!

The villains won, beat all of the old comic heroes and made the world forget they were ever real. Instead people believe that characters like Superman are just fictional, and our world is secretly controlled and ran by super-villains. The protagonist of the story becomes a villain like his father and leads all other villains in his badassery.

What a unique and interesting story…that they decided not to do for the movie. While I did like Wanted as a film, it would have been a million times better if they had had the balls to make it like its source.
 

The Spirit (2008)

And the winner is!

This is without a doubt the worst comic book movie of all time, and possibly the worst movie I have ever seen. I wanted to walk out. This is just proof that just because someone does something amazing, like 300 and Sin City, does not mean they should be given free reign.

The main problem this movie had was that it could not decide if it was going to be serious or camp, so it ended up just being stupid. The plot and dialogue were ridiculous and there was no great mystery and atmosphere like I had been expecting from similar era sources, like Dick Tracy and The Shadow.

The Spirit’s teaser trailer was amazing. After that it was all downhill.

CONCLUSION

And finally, there’s Ant-Man. Whoops, that’s slated for 2011, but its day will come.

Most of the other major comic book movies that might spring to mind, I liked. League of Extraordinary Gentlemen could have been better, longer, but I loved Ghost Rider no matter what anyone else says, and the newest Punisher movie was so good (and so sadly underrated) that it blew me away.

We obviously know how to make good comic book movies. The Dark Knight and Ironman prove that we are in a whole new era of just how good they can be. There is no excuse anymore for crappy ones.

As we await Green Lantern, Thor, the new Captain America, Deadpool, and many others, we can only hope that Hollywood doesn’t decide to suddenly prove otherwise yet again. After all, we know just how capable they are of ruining comic book movies too.

~G³

I feel like I have been neglecting anime, so next week will be “The Shoujo Love Triangle” blog. Oh, how I hate them, and yet they dominate most mainstream anime. My hubby and I are even watching a new one, though it may prove to beat the stereotype. We’ll see.

Thanks for tuning in.

Images taken from:
http://thecarter.files.wordpress.com/2008/04/captain_america.jpg
http://www.taisha.org/test/jryd/fj/photo/2008F03F31816853525.jpg
http://videoeta.com/news/2555
http://c2.api.ning.com/files/j6K3hY37iy61MnRBQv9g8SQjZu7AZShiJys9*v8TFdJr6qXfXit1nj6PGsJmkKwphqNfNE64PBLWWwEMFTAqWWzcQPukWI5d/fruitsbasket.jpg
http://rotaractkl.files.wordpress.com/2009/05/the-spirit.jpg

http://splicedwire.com/04reviews/catwoman.jpg

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