My Go-To Guilty Pleasure Movies
LEGENDARY
Alright I confess it, I’m the weird guy who likes obviously bad films. I mean we all have one or two bad films that we enjoy but I really do like a lot of them. You can put me in front of Thor: The Dark World and I’ll watch it. There are seriously very few movies that I will downright refuse to watch for a second time and most of those have less to do about being bad and more to do with being difficult to watch.
But I’m not here to list all of the movies I enjoy watching, I’d literally never be able to stop writing. Seriously, I’d write until Thursday and then three new movies I enjoy would release and I’d never get caught up. I’ve never even seen half the movies that I’d have to find time to get down on this page. Instead, I’m going to give you some objectively bad movies that I found joy in and you will too.
Pacific Rim & Pacific Rim Uprising
I’m not going to sit here and lie to you and say that the first Pacific Rim movie is overwhelmingly hated by critics and audiences because it just isn’t. But to me, you can’t have one on this list without the other. The are the Yin to Yang. Peanut Butter to Jelly. Beyonce to Jay-Z, you get the picture, It wouldn’t make sense to not list them together and it really wouldn’t make sense to watch Uprising without the original. So Pacific Rim gets the nod on my esteemed list.
The Pacific Rim movies are essentially about giant Godzilla or Reptar (Rugrats for the win!) monsters coming out of the ground to destroy earth while giant robots (similar to when all the Power Rangers join together) attempt to defend against them. That’s it right? What else could I possibly need to say to hook you on this movie? Giant monsters and robots fight for the Earth? Sign me up right there.
But if that’s not enough to get you hooked I can continue. Charlie Day is one of the actors who crosses over between the first movie and into the second movie. He puts on one of the best crazy man who turns out to be right performances while still delivering that patented
Charlie Day schtick. He’s a scene stealer in these movies and thankfully for us he’s in a ton of scenes. Not only do we get blessed with Charlie Day performances but we get blessed by Idris Elba and John Boyega respectively.
Look are these movies with flaws? Absolutely. Do the plots make total sense? Absolutely not. But you know what these movies have going for it, that so many bad movies miss the mark on? The Pacfic Rim movies are bucket loads of fun. They are popcorn chomping, blockbuster action, stomach laughing levels of fun. These aren’t movies that will stick with you for weeks, days or even hours after watching but they are a damn good time and sometimes that’s enough.
Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets
STX ENTERTAINMENT
Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets doesn’t belong on this list. Or at least to me it doesn’t. But to the majority of film snobs around the world this is a bad movie. The problem is those people are wrong. Valerian is an underrated, objectively good film. Do the main actors struggle at times to carry the load at certain times in the film? Sure. Do the special effects sometimes not hold up to the expectations of a science fiction movie? That would be fair to say. But if you put that aside, we get a really fun and intriguing space adventure with two characters that are easy to root for. Dane Dehaan and Cara Delivigne, deliver likable and enjoyable characters that allow movie watchers to look past their struggles as burgeoning actors.
Even better than the actors is the actual plot of the movie. Without giving away to much, it’s sort of a Men in Black mixed with Star Wars mixed with Kingsman in space. We see Valerian and Laurelai (Dehaan and Delivigne respectively) go on a mission to a space world where their mission doesn’t go exactly as planned. This is a movie that a lot of you won’t have seen and that’s a complete shame. Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets is a movie you’ll watch and then spend the next 5 years waiting to see if the planned sequel ever gets greenlit (Spoiler it tragically doesn’t.) It’s a movie that was to create a trilogy fork but sadly
marketing and critics ruined those chances for us. We owe it to director Luc Besson to at least support his work of art now, so it doesn’t end up forgotten forever.
The Do-Over
Okay now we are getting into truly horrendous movie territory. You can all thank me as this will be the only Adam Sandler movie to grace it’s presence on the list. Pixels, Just Go With It and Grown Ups 2 could have also easily made the way onto the list. So why does The Do Over win out above any of the other choices? Well for starters it’s the movie that I anticipate the least amount of you have watched, possibly even heard of. And secondly it’s not just an Adam Sandler film. It’s also a David Spade film. I mean sure David Spade also appears in Grown Ups 2 but we don’t really get to see him truly shine. He’s more of an side character in Grown Ups 2 and here he is part of the main dish.
So what exactly is The Do-Over? Well it’s clearly an excuse for Adam Sandler and David Spade to have a nice island vacation. Aside from that it's a comedy forward pseudo spy thriller that is definitely out to get laughs more than suspense. In fact, in a majority of the movie the actual plot is just used as a way to push out more comedy.
I know what you’re thinking “this sounds like another dumb Adam Sandler movie.” And in a way you would be right. But what separates this movie from other heaps of Adam Sandler movies is that some of the comedy is actually pretty funny. It’s pretty clear in this movie (and other Sandler Netflix films) that they kind of let Sandler use his own style of jokes. Spade to for that matter. And you know what? It really does work. It’s funny, it’s raunch and it’s a bad movie, but it truly is a movie that everyone should watch once.
Failure to Launch
I am the first to admit I’m an absolute sucker for rom coms. It’s an absolute travesty that current day Hollywood has rendered them essentially obsolete. Movie goers today deserve the early 2000’s rom com a month at the box office. Now we are lucky to get a single half
decent rom com a year. This is just one of many Matthew McConaughey led rom coms of the decade and for some reason critics find this to be one of the worst. Whether it be a story line that seems familiar to other McConaughey works (How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days), an over saturation in the rom com market, or the fact that this is a cheesy love story; This movie often gets overlooked for how great of a movie it actually is.
Failure to Launch is a movie that gives a spin on a traditional romantic comedy. Instead of the pair meeting by chance or being set up or something of the sort, Sarah Jessica Parker’s character is actually hired by Matthew McConaughey’s parents to date him as a means to get him out of their house. Because of this we see a dynamic never before seen in a film before, or again until the eerily similar plot of the Jennifer Lawrence movie No Hard Feelings. Instead of the pair being on equal ground, we get to see Matthew McConaughey’s character start out metaphorically beneath Sarah Jessica Parker’s character. This allows for McConaughey’s charm to shine through in a way that a lot of films can’t. What may usually come through as arrogance for McConaughey, he is able to deliver as a charming confidence in the movie allowing him one of his best comedic performances of all time.
Failure to Launch isn’t a movie I’d recommend to people who don’t traditionally enjoy the genre, but for those who do it’s a fantastic way to see Matthew McConaughey in a more vulnerable and relatable performance.