The Daly Planet 2015 Movie Awards: The Five Most Disappointing Films of 2015

Check out all of our 2015 Daly Planet Movie awards here! Day two of our Movie Awards has us being a little more negative.  Today we’ll be looking at the most disappointing films of 2015.  These are movies I had really high hopes for, but they really let me down. This doesn’t mean they were bad movies, or that I didn’t like them, but rather they failed to meet my expectations. Take that for what it’s worth. On to the list!

Star Wars: The Force Awakens - Read our review here!

Put away your torches and pitchforks, angry masses. I think I made it pretty clear in my mostly positive review that I did really like the movie. Star Wars is fun! It’s a propulsive, exciting ride of an action movie with a lot of really great characters. It’s also got a ton of story problems. Problems that become more apparent the more you think about them (especially after a second viewing). I can tell that the script wasn’t really nailed down at the time of filming and that some pretty dramatic changes needed to be made midstream. The 3rd act doesn’t really flow well from the first two and there’s some plot points that weren’t fleshed out enough. It’s also mostly just a retread of the previous movies. I wanted this to be a Star Wars movie with a great script that explores some new parts of the galaxy and I didn’t get that. Despite really liking the movie, I was hoping for a little more. What we got was good, but disappointing. Maybe in Episode VIII?

Avengers: Age of Ultron

I love the Marvel Cinematic Universe and I especially loved the first Avengers movie. It perfectly culminates all the previous films and brings it together in such an epic, wonderful moment. So maybe my expectations for the sequel were a bit too high. Maybe. As much as I liked Age of Ultron, I was really disappointed by it. There are some really great individual moments in there, but the movie is so overstuffed with a thousand different things that it’s almost too much. Worse, some of the action got plain boring. There’s only so many times you can see a CG Iron Man hit a CG Hulk into a building before your eyes start to gloss over. And while I loved the stakes of the final, climactic battle, the actual action was really dull as our characters just continue to mow down thousands of Ultrons with surprising ease. Age of Ultron was good, and it has me excited about what the Marvel Cinematic Universe has in store for phase 3.  But when I look at it compared to the less ambitious and much smaller (and better) Ant-Man, I can’t help but be disappointed.

Southpaw

I really like boxing movies and I really like director Antoine Fuqua. So when I heard Fuqua was making a boxing movie I was pretty excited to check it out.  Sadly, Southpaw just isn’t very good. Jake Gyllenhaal is a good actor, but he plays a character so unlikeable that you’re never really rooting for him (something that’s kind of important in a sports movie). For most of the movie I was just thinking that Billy Hope kind of got what he deserved. Furthermore, the filming of the boxing isn’t that great, especially when compared to Ryan Coogler’s Creed. I’m still firmly in Fuqua’s corner (Olympus Has Fallen is the most head-stabbing fun you’ll have watching a movie), but I expected more of him.

The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part 2 - Read our review here!

The Hunger Games series is really great. It’s one of the better science fiction stories of our generation. Despite not really enjoying the final book all that much, I really enjoyed Mockingjay Part 1, which managed to successfully sell a story about wartime propaganda to the masses; the Jennifer Lawrence effect I guess. So maybe I got my expectations a bit too high for the final entry in the series. Regardless, Mockingjay Part 2 was a huge letdown. A messy, poorly paced film that squashed all the goodwill built up by the films before it. It also contains an epilogue scene that challenges the one in Harry Potter for dumbest, unnecessary addition to a story. It looks like there are more Hunger Games movies on the way, but after Mockingjay Part 2, I’m finished with Panem. 1 . Jupiter Ascending I’ve expressed how much I love The Wachowskis’ Speed Racer here in the past. But the truth is I’m a big fan of just about every one of their movies. Which is why I was so disappointed with just how truly bad Jupiter Ascending was. I was so depressed I didn’t even bother to review the film for the site, choosing instead to pretend like it never happened (until today of course). I have no idea what happened with this movie. It’s inexplicably miscast with poor Mila Kunis and Channing Tatum (both good actors) struggling with stifling, exposition-heavy dialogue and a complete lack of chemistry. I love original science fiction films, but Jupiter Ascending is just an absolute mess. What the heck went wrong here? My love for the Wachowskis prevents me from putting this on my worst movies of the year list (coming tomorrow), but I will happily declare this my biggest disappointment of the year. How about you guys?  What movie really disappointed you? How mad are you at me for the Star Wars thing?  Let me know in the comments below. Tomorrow we take another trip to negative town to discuss the 10 worst movies of 2015.