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Essays, Not Rants! 331: Good Bad Movies
I like bad movies. I really do. Take Outcast as an example; its plot is pretty simple: Former crusader Hayden Christensen winds up in China where he’s protecting the rightful prince from said prince’s vengeful older brother. Also, Nic Cage is in it as Hayden Christensen’s old mentor-turned-hermit who’s acting in a very different movie from everyone else. All this to say, it’s an utter delight. Not that it’s a good movie; Outcast has a host of issues, ranging from being unable to decide what accent the Chinese characters should have when speaking English (the same family has one with an English accent and another with an American) to the fact that it really reinforces the whole White Savior narrative, what with the best summary of it being "Hayden Christensen and Nic Cage save China." Yet it’s an enjoyable mess, and Nic Cage’s performance alone is worth the couple hours in front of the tv.
It’s really easy, especially in cinephile and filmmaking circles, to get caught up in the whole idea of Quality. Like, is a movie Good, is it Important? There’s a canon of sorts for what’s allowed to be considered The Best (woe unto you if The Godfather doesn’t crack your top ten list). For the most part, though, a lot of these movies rightly deserve their hallowed spot; The Godfather is indeed excellent and holy ###### is Casablanca a masterwork of film. In light of this, more pulpy fare like The Avengers or Scott Pilgrim get relegated since, sure, they’re entertaining, but they aren’t that Important.
But why isn’t entertaining enough? I’m very partial to both The Avengers and Scott Pilgrim for telling really interesting, well-wrought stories that despite a flashy exterior, touch on deeper themes (sacrifice and unity for the first, self-respect for the second). And most of all, they’re really fun. There’s no denying that Whiplash is an excellent movie, but it’s not one I’ll pop in while hanging out with friends. Though Ant-Man and The Wasp is undoubtably a movie worse in quality and critical reception, it remains a movie that’s just plan fun. Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom is a movie that I’d call aggressively stupid, but I was grinning ear to ear for just about the entire film.
There’s much to be said for that. I could spend a very long rant essay discussing all of the fallacies and nonsensical plot developments of Fallen Kingdom, but, really, does that even matter? I had fun watching the movie, more fun than I had watching, say, Molly’s Game or even Deadpool 2. It’s why Fallen Kingdom is a movie I can recommend wholeheartedly to anyone in it to watch dinosaurs wreck stuff rather than a treatise on the sublime majesty and horror of those extinct terrible lizards. And really, that’s all the movie sets out to do. It has no assumptions about itself as something more than that; it wants to be a really fun movie and it succeeds. Heck, look at Mamma Mia: Here We Go Again, a movie with a tangential grasp of narrative consequence and character development, but it’s such darn fun and a great way to spend a couple hours.
I don’t deny that there are bad movies (and good grief, there are some that are truly awful), but I think there is still a delight to be found in movies that aren’t great and yet are enjoyable all the same. Not even necessarily movies good in their badness like The Room or even the aforementioned Outcast, which are enjoyable for how poorly they missed the mark set out for themselves, but rather ones that have low aims and succeed wonderfully. There’s a movie about a giant killer shark coming out, The Meg, and it looks incredibly silly, but also super fun. And if I’m going to the movies to chill out after work, why not be willing to turn off my brain and enjoy a fun, bad movie?
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