This year marks the 20th anniversary of iconic movies like The Departed, Little Miss Sunshine, Pan’s Labyrinth and Meryl Streep‘s iconic The Devil Wears Prada — the latter of which receives a highly anticipated sequel next month.
While there’s plenty to celebrate from the film industry’s output 20 years ago, there are also some particular movies that don’t deserve to see the light of day again.
Watch With Us wants to look back on five movies celebrating 20th anniversaries this year that we’d actually rather forget about.
Our first selection is none other than the abysmal The Pink Panther remake starring Steve Martin and Beyoncé.
‘The Pink Panther’
A ring featuring the priceless Pink Panther diamond goes missing after its owner, the coach of a French soccer team, is killed. To track down the missing gem, Chief Inspector Dreyfus (Kevin Kline) assembles a secret crack team of his best detectives while making the bumbling, dimwitted Inspector Jacques Clouseau (Martin) the public face of the investigation. Though both hopeless and hapless, Clouseau manages to get on the killer’s trail through a series of misadventures.
Adapted from the classic Pink Panther movies starring Peter Sellers, this new Pink Panther takes everything that was beloved about the original films from the 1960s and puts it through a meat grinder. What results is a mind-numbingly grating experience, full of easy, unintelligent gags, an overload of slapstick humor, terrible narrative writing and ultimately a poor showing from Martin as Clouseau, relying heavily on over-exaggeration that is less funny than it is obnoxious.
‘Garfield: A Tail of Two Kitties’
When Jon Arbuckle (Breckin Meyer) decides to propose to his girlfriend Liz (Jennifer Love Hewitt), he plans to do it by secretly following her to London for her business trip and surprising her. Despite leaving Odie and Garfield (Bill Murray) in a kennel while he’s gone, Jon’s pets manage to escape and hitch a ride in his luggage. When they traverse the streets of London, one thing leads to another and Garfield is suddenly mistaken for a cat who’s the royal heir to a castle. Unfortunately, Garfield’s lap of luxury is impeded by the conniving Lord Dargis (Billy Connolly).
Poor reviews from the first Garfield movie didn’t seem to inspire this sequel to be any better — in fact, A Tale of Two Kitties sports an impressive 12 percent Rotten Tomatoes score, two percentage points lower than the first film. If you’re a child who loves terrible jokes and fart humor, then maybe you’ll be able to stand the cringe-inducing “charms” of this film. Otherwise, Garfield: A Tale of Two Kitties more than deserves its Razzie nomination for Worst Prequel or Sequel.
‘Eragon’
If you were a fan of the YA fantasy novel Eragon in the 2000s, then you were likely heartbroken by the dreadful movie adaptation that it received in 2006. The plot follows poor farm boy Eragon (Ed Speleers), who lives in the kingdom of Alagaesia ruled by the evil monarch Galbatorix (John Malkovich). By chance, Eragon finds a stone while hunting in the woods that he realizes is an egg when a dragon hatches from it. With the last dragon now having emerged, Eragon has a chance to bring peace to the world, bring back the order of the Dragon Riders and overthrow Galbatorix.
Eragon received poor marks from critics at the time for just about everything: script, faithfulness to the source material, acting and visuals, with the only true bright spots being Speleers, Jeremy Irons, and the creature special effects. Otherwise, Eragon is shockingly forgettable and incompetent for such a richly written novel, lacking in convincing world-building, textured production design or a story that has baseline originality. In the spirit of Percy Jackson and the Olympians, Eragon is what not to do when adapting a YA book.
‘When a Stranger Calls’
Over a hundred miles away, a teenager and the children she was babysitting are murdered after she received a series of strange phone calls. This information is unbeknownst to teenager Jill Johnson (Camilla Belle), who settles into what she believes will be an ordinary night watching over the children of a wealthy couple. But while the kids are fast asleep, Jill begins receiving mysterious phone calls in which the caller says nothing and then hangs up. As the calls become increasingly threatening, Jill soon realizes that her life is at risk.
While When a Stranger Calls is technically a remake of the 1979 horror film of the same name, it’s really only a remake of the original movie’s famous first 23 minutes, extended further into a feature-length film. The result? A movie that robs the original of everything that made it so iconic. The suspense feels manufactured and unearned, the script is unoriginal, the jump scares are fright-free and overall, the movie plays everything extremely safe. If you want to watch a horror movie that’s just bad, look no further.
‘The Da Vinci Code’
American symbologist Robert Langdon (Tom Hanks) is summoned by the Paris police to examine the body of murdered Louvre curator Jacques Saunière (Jean-Pierre Marielle), who’s been posed like Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man and bears a hidden cipher readable only by UV light. At the end of the decoded cipher is a secret message implicating Langdon, and the police believe him to be the killer. Assisted by police cryptologist Sophie Neveu (Audrey Tautou), Langdon escapes on a quest to find the real killer and the site of the legendary Holy Grail — the location of which is encoded in da Vinci’s The Last Supper.
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Like the original novel by Dan Brown, Ron Howard‘s adaptation of The Da Vinci Code was highly controversial upon release, yet what made Brown’s novel such an addictive read is evidently not present in this overstuffed film version. Aside from any claims of sacrilege you might want to make, the movie is just ploddingly dull and excessively ridiculous, bereft of any true star charisma or narrative excitement aside from a series of seemingly unending clues.
