Worst Fourth Film In A Series

I liked these (note: I don't think all of them are "good" per se, but I enjoyed watching them):

Alien: Resurrection
Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Road Chip
The Bourne Legacy
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
Ice Age: Continental Drift
Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull <-- not even Shia Leboeuf swings with monkeys could ruin this for me*
Lethal Weapon 4
Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol
Resident Evil: Afterlife
Shrek Forever After
Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace
Underworld: Awakening

* I was going to reword this but, no

no wait, shit, was thinking of at world's end. never saw on stranger tides. love the tim powers novel, though.

yeah on stranger tides automatically cannot be the worst because at least it represented a big payday for powers.

leaving out ones where i truly have no idea, or enough sense of the series to know whether i'd be pissed or indifferent if the fourth one suddenly started sucking:

ESSENTIALLY COMPETENT MOVIEMAKING, NO DISGRACE TO THE SERIES:

Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire - see above

OKAY AFTERNOON VIEWING ON CABLE, JUST DISAPPOINTINGLY INESSENTIAL AND ORDINARY:

Alien: Resurrection - see above
Jurassic World - see above
Rocky IV - tbh i've never watched the whole thing but i think it'd be down

JUST SHORT OF PASSABLE AFTERNOON VIEWING ON CABLE - LAME, DISGRACEFUL, AND SO DISTRACTINGLY LOUD, STUPID OR TONE-DEAF AS TO IMPEDE IDLE ENJOYMENT WITH A HANGOVER:

Batman & Robin - see above
Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull - just painfully ordinary and without personality, weight or momentum (except the p. good early Indy/Shia scenes where Spielberg clearly came in and took over for a while), but easier to forget than Star Wars and doesn't ruin Indy in the same way.

TRULY DIRE SLOGS:

Superman IV: The Quest For Peace - see above
Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace - see nearly 3,000 posts in the crimes of george lucas thread

NO IDEA, BUT COULD IMAGINE THEM BEING HALF DECENT?

Barbershop: The Next Cut - no idea
The Bourne Legacy - zzz but probably at least competently made?
Bride of Chucky - sure
Conquest of the Planet of the Apes - always been weirdly curious about the very oddball-sounding premises of the later PotA movies.
Fast & Furious - i can't really tell the films in this series apart but people i respect say they actually start getting better as it goes on. dunno if it's 4 or 5 where that's supposed to happen though.
Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol - everyone says this is great
A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master - my sense is the sequels in this series are generally kinda consistent, it's just basically an anthology of weird dream horror sequences strung together by freddy right?
The Next Karate Kid - female karate kid is a nice idea and prob. inspired some kids idk
Rambo - actually probably awful
Spy Kids: All The Time In The World - loved the first and feel there are too few kids movies of this kind
The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor - actually probably awful

HAVEN'T SEEN BUT MUST ASSUME THEY ARE LIKELY MORE PAINFUL TO WATCH THAN PHANTOM MENACE:

Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Road Chip - can you imagine watching four movies of this shit
Death Wish 4: The Crackdown - Cannon Group rule
Ernest Scared Stupid - tho tbh I doubt it is much different from the previous couple. "Camp" is the only classic.
The Final Destination - should have called it "final final destination"
Hellraiser: Bloodline, Highlander: Endgame - should have been combined into one movie
Ice Age: Continental Drift - these are so fucking UGLY
Jaws: the Revenge - go-to symbol of old-school sequelitis
Lethal Weapon 4 - never watched any, but seems like the first is not my style and they all get worse. isn't this the one with the racism?
Live Free or Die Hard - i am 100% the target market of this film and i took one look at the trailer and went "nnnnope."
Meatballs 4 - first had a mild charm when not creepy/rapey, but why watch any sans Murray? here, corey feldman saves the camp in a water-skiing championship.
Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides - already wrecked by the second two dumb 'trilogy' pieces. imagining an even more broken ratio of depp's mugging to everything else... yikes.
Police Academy 4: Citizens On Patrol - i guess i've heard it's better than 5-7?
Saw IV - horrible series, suspect this is the least pleasant viewing experience of anything here
Scary Movie 4 - somehow worries me more than Scream 4
Shrek Forever After - hate this unfunny genre-wrecking shit, kids deserve better and i'm offended on their behalf
Terminator Salvation - third one already nailed the 'afternoon cable whatever' category, this just looked bleak and tiring
Transformers: Age of Extinction - what can you even say?
Vegas Vacation - even the first one, fourteen years earlier, was more cringey than funny for most of the time.

Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Road Chip - can you imagine watching four movies of this shit

... what has happened to me and my life

the essential gayness of batman & robin rescues it for me in a way that i think the essential gayness of nightmare on elm street 2 rescues that movie for others

iirc the final destination is the worst final destination sequel but i get them all mixed up in my head

final destination 5 however i remember in its full integrity and it's fucking awesome

re: Batman & Robin's much-discussed rubber fetish shots

I was at the exact age to overvalue those latex butt and cup shots, and I *still* fell asleep during the movie, one of the only times that's happened to me in a theater.

tbh i can't really hold anything against a film that has led to something as reliably cheering as youtube supercuts of arnold's lines and of course Lines uttered by Arnold Scwarzenegger (as Mr Freeze) in "Batman & Robin"

What film series holds the record for the most entries following a sequel which purports to be the "final" one? Probably Friday the 13th, right?

Lethal weapon, Bourne and MI all good rest trash

Lethal weapon, Bourne and MI all good rest trash

Chucky is the aberrant movie series that strangely hits its stride by the fourth entry (I think the first three are all different shades of mediocre), mostly by fully embracing the fundamental absurdity of the concept. The fifth is completely bugshit and my favorite by a country mile, and the sixth is a pretty decent straight horror film (and probably the first in the series that actually tries for scares). I never would've expected to find myself saying as much, but I'm looking forward to the upcoming seventh installment of the Child's Play series.

Yeah, Chucky is by far the most transformative (for the better) series refresh on this entire list.

6 was good? huh

Surprisingly. I don't really understand why it was released direct-to-video, but I think they're planning to go theatrical again with the next one.

I'll check it out - I liked 4 and 5, and yeah the latter is v enjoyable in its over-the-topness

6 plays it pretty straight and almost feels like a reboot until the end ties it back in to the absurdity of the previous two.

(Just realized that Citizen Toxie is missing from this list.)

Ghost Protocol is not just great but potentially (based on how great Rogue Nation is) films 4-6 of the MI trilogy could all be better than 1-3. i like the first MI, but i think it's a shade below 4&5. (MI2 is not terrible but not good, MI3 is fine but basically an extended episode of Alias, JJ Abrams isn't that good tbh.)

Where will Avatar 4 fall?

Flat on its dumb face, if there's any justice in the world.

You mean "3-D on its dumb face."

The Concorde... Airport '79 is my favourite title out of these

The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor has everything in the title plus a Yeti. It exceeded my low expectations.

I voted for jurassic world because of the scene where the nanny is punishment killed for talking on a cellphone, and the punishment is to be picked up by pterodactyl, dropped, picked up, dropped, etc, then swallowed along with pterodactyl by mosasaurus. Wrong sort of thing to happen in the sort of movie this is supposed to be.

According to the director, it was supposed to be a surprise to extreme-kill a character who didn't deserve it. it didn't work, especially with bryce howard's regressive character arc being in there too.

Exorcist: The Beginning, Superman IV, and TErminator: Salvation all in the running for me

Exorcist: The Beginning quite possibly one of the dumbest things I've had the misfortune to sit through. Schrader's cut of the film, Dominion wasn't exactly high quality horror but it was 30 times better than Harlin's.

Terminator Salvation and Jurassic World were horrific in absolute terms.

the interesting thing about this is optics. the general viewing public would agree with you on Terminator and consider you blasphemous on Jurassic World, yet fundamentally, both were about equally stupid.

(my friends all loved JW and for the life of me I can't figure out why)

lol forgot about Scream 4, what a fuckin' turd

I voted for jurassic world because of the scene where the nanny is punishment killed for talking on a cellphone, and the punishment is to be picked up by pterodactyl, dropped, picked up, dropped, etc, then swallowed along with pterodactyl by mosasaurus. Wrong sort of thing to happen in the sort of movie this is supposed to be.

I agree. A truly sour moment in a movie that is otherwise just harmless junk.

Agreed, dactyl scene was grossss and also SO WEIRD b/c the movie really builds up this idea of o no the park is a park and all the tourists are in danger!!! And this is the one scene where that actually matters and THIS is how they decide to punctuate it??

Voted Indy but Alvin 4 should get an award of some kind because I spent a minute looking at the title "the Road Chip" before I understood what it meant. Not a very clear pun. Alternatively, maybe I deserve an award for stupidity

there's also the squeakuel which is called the squeakuel because of squeaks

[](my friends all loved JW and for the life of me I can't figure out why)

― waht, I am true black metal worrior (Neanderthal), Friday, March 17, 2017 10:37 PM (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink[]

I wouldn't say I loved or even particularly liked it but I found the experience fleetingly enjoyable, similar to the old and shitty horror/sci-fi movies I watch all the time.

Totally agree about the needlessly torturous death of the assistant, though. Took me right out of the thing.

'Where will Avatar 4 fall?"

I'm honestly baffled that he's working on these sequels that absolutely no one has ever asked for or wanted. Does anyone think fondly of Avatar? I don't think so. A barely interesting idea with dated tech that was interminably long.

The assistant was an actress acting

https://pbs.twimg.com/profile_images/714604156212932608/eE6okxre_200x200.jpg

But Jimmy Buffett actually was killed by dinosaurs, right?

Ah now that, that's a story for a pint sometime

i thought jurassic world was fine. it's not as good as jurassic park but it's better and 2 and 3.

jurassic world actually felt a lot like 3 to me in a way - marching through the motions of a jurassic park movie without stakes or gravity, and with kinda rushed and uninteresting characters. they have to get through a certain number of dinosaur obstacles and then the movie is over, ta-da. there's even the "a new dinosaur, even bigger than T-Rex, but also somehow goofier!" element. but no william h. macy - a huge error i think.

2 isn't a great movie, probably spielberg's second- or third-worst actually, but there was some kind of effort to set up and pay off character relationships, even if they were hackneyed. setting it mostly at night is also smart (spookier, hides the edges of the special effects). postlethwaite is fun. the "raptors in the grass" scene and the (admittedly over-long) truck-over-the-cliff sequence are what put it in the black for me though - well-staged, clear, suspenseful and exciting, and expressly not relying on minutes and minutes of dino CG to the exclusion of all else. kinda the last stand of the guy who made 'duel' and 'jaws.'

Lost World loses purely because of "gymnast somersaults and kicks over megaton dinosaur"

for some that might be evidence of the complete opposite though

Nadir of the film, I'd say, but would also have totally ruled in a different type of movie, like if the Spy Kids had been sent to the Island of Lost Dinosaurs.

my problem with Jurassic World is it didn't know what kind of movie it wanted to be. It had the references to its cinematic history which served no purpose other than being "meta". It had stilted self-referential humor which didn't work considered the movie did a poor job of recognizing several other areas where it was being ridiculous (ie, the extremely clumsy use of the "we want to steal this tech for the military" trope).

I enjoyed when people were eating it in the movie, but it didn't happen very often, and as stated above, nobody that wasn't wearing a JW uniform other than the poor nanny was ever in any real danger.

the Vincent D subplot about the military didn't even make sense. You're going to somehow transport these megaton beasts into battle and have them do your bidding? besides these animals' demonstration of insubordination, it seems like a lot of work for minimal payoff and possible unintended consequences (ie a civilian town being mistakenly eaten). I'm just sick of that trope though to begin with.

can't it just be a movie about posh, well-to-do folk who have grown so bored of mundane Earth that they force scientists to do irresponsible tinkering for their amusement? but that would have only worked if massive civilian casualties happened.

Oh mannnnnn I forgot about the Vincent D stuff! Yeah that really was awful, and senseless as you point out. There's a possible movie where everybody knows how goofy this idea of dinosaur soldiers is (I basically was picturing Dino Riders - raptors decked out with headsets and laser guns) but here they try to just do it as a ripoff of Paul Reiser from Aliens and every time he's on the screen you're just waiting for him to derail the main plot of the movie.

Similarly there might have been a strong movie out of the concept of, okay, Jurassic Park had Spielberg linking his own compulsion to entertain (as the aging lovable circus showman) to the foolhardiness of resurrecting dinosaurs via those narrow moments of real wonder and delight that convince you Hammond would want to do this thing. So Jurassic World will really be about the foolhardiness of a giant corporate enterprise trying to seamlessly recreate and repackage that long-gone dose of original wonder. Got it. There IS something to the idea of starting the film with the dinosaurs effectively neutered and tamed, the audience going through the motions and unmoved, the new special effects not working. But then they go ahead and make a normal contemporary blockbuster where the monsters remain tame, the audience bored, the new special effects not working. We never really have a sublime experience, the wonder or the real terror never come back, the movie just moves forward and ends. Missed opportunity.