14. “What Lies Beneath” (2000)
Made during the long break in the production of “Cast Away” while Tom Hanks lost weight and grew his beard, “What Lies Beneath” was seemingly intended as a sort of palate-cleanser for Zemeckis, an old-school chiller letting him indulge his inner Hitchcock. Instead, it’s rather puzzling, like an A-list director and cast lost a bet and decided to tackle one of those ropey PG-13 Screen Gems horror movies that come out in early September. Written, curiously, by actor Clark Gregg (yes, Agent Coulson from the Marvel movies), it sees Michelle Pfeiffer and Harrison Ford as a well-off older couple whose marriage is put to the test when Pfeiffer’s character starts to see what may or may not be a ghost with ties to a past indiscretion of her husband’s. The two stars make an appealing pair, and Ford, in particular, proves to be effective against-type casting once his villainy is revealed, but bar a few bits of subtle VFX wizardry, the film looks as drab as its story, which can’t embrace its campiness to the extent that you’ll have much fun. There are moments of atmosphere, but ultimately Zemeckis proves all too reliant on the kind of jump scares that most direct-to-video horror helmers would turn their noses up at, and the wonky supernatural mythology makes it difficult to build up the kind of Hitchcockian suspense that the director’s after. Ultimately, it feels tossed off more than anything.
13. “Beowulf” (2007)
For those amongst us who spent English class daydreaming about what the reputed epic Olde English poem “Beowulf” would look like on the big screen, the answer is… not quite what Robert Zemeckis had in mind when he took the story to the cineplexes worldwide back in 2007. The director’s mammoth, lumbering, fanboy-friendly animated 3D re-jiggering of the Geatish warrior’s fearsome exploits is about as far away from “traditional” notions as one can get. And no, that doesn’t exactly mean the film is good —the CGI is often noticeably artificial, the accents are all over the map and the delicacy and grace of the original text are mostly lost in the muddle. And yet, compared to the stiff and lifeless “The Polar Express” and the just-plain-agonizing “A Christmas Carol,” this film certainly ranks as the most enjoyable animated effort from the director. Ray Winstone lends his signature gravelly baritone to the title role, (the disparity between our CGI hero’s chiseled physique and Winstone’s more bearish frame is also more than a little distracting) while Zemeckis finds his ideal Grendel in the form of his “Back to the Future” star and everyone’s favorite world-class weirdo Crispin Glover. Angelina Jolie also vamps it up as the monster’s mother, because… of course, she does! The whole thing is more silly than awe-inspiring, but considering the staggering ambition of the undertaking, it feels unfair to label the film as an outright dud. Instead, it’s a big, dumb, brash Hollywood re-fashioning of an enduring English literary classic, as well as a showcase for Zemeckis the whiz-kid to do like his hero and flex his muscles in the animated realm.
12. “Forrest Gump” (1994)
Here it is, folks. The movie that famously robbed “Pulp Fiction” of the Oscar many feel it deserved, turned “life is like a box of chocolates” into a nationally-recognized catchphrase and firmly established Zemeckis as a director who could actually win awards. So how does it play after all these years? A hymn to the essential goodness of a slow-witted Alabama man (Tom Hanks) who, through some serendipitous twists of fate, ends up bearing witness to many of the 20th century’s most significant cultural and political events, it’s an odd, bittersweet riff on the American-style epic. But while “Gump” undeniably struck a nerve in the culture of 1994, it doesn’t play nearly as well today. Large chunks of the film feel grossly oversimplified and occasionally just plain wrongheaded —particularly in the film’s naïve and ultimately troubling depiction of racism and the mid-century war machine, as well as its Wikipedia bullet-point approach to history itself. Hanks is warm and appealing, but then, he usually is. The role may have won him an Oscar (his second in two years) but frankly, he can do this sort of thing in his sleep. The fact remains that Forrest, for all his essential innocence, isn’t a particularly interesting character, and that it has very little to do with his intelligence. Perhaps choosing this simpleton as our guide through the rockier passages of American history is supposed to be some sort of loaded political statement, but given Forrest’s wholly reactionary, idiot-savant persona, we really hope not. Twenty-one years later, “Forrest Gump” remains a puzzling anomaly: it is certainly Zemeckis’ most financially successful picture and is unquestionably his most overrated, though whether it quite deserves to be the cinephile punching-bag it has become of late is another question.
11. “Flight” (2012)
While many have heralded 2012’s grimly serious “Flight” as a return of sorts to the inherent humanism that always lay at the heart of Zemeckis’s best work, the Denzel Washington-starring drama is ultimately too problematic to properly classify as a comeback. The story is that of African-American airline pilot Whip Whitaker and his struggles with substance abuse, (indeed, there’s nothing like a little Colombian marching powder with your vodka and OJ to get you up and kicking in the morning), after he miraculously saves a plane full of people with a daring maneuver while still off his face. “Flight” is satisfying enough on basic storytelling terms, but the film is plagued with issues, particularly in regards to character and continuity. Poor Kelly Reilly, who was asked to do little more than sulk and strut on this abysmal last season of “True Detective”, struggles to make the most of a thinly-written part as a recovering heroin/meth addict who finds herself drawn into Whip’s increasingly bleak downward spiral. John Goodman, meanwhile, plays a good-time drug dealer and an old friend of Whip’s who you know is bad news because the filmmakers feel the need to loudly announce his scenes by playing “Sympathy for the Devil” by the Stones (it also makes an annoyingly obvious use of Cream’s “White Room,” go figure). The actors certainly give it their all and an Oscar-nominated Washington is, as always, fiercely committed. And yet a film that sets out to tackle such heavy thematic material as grief, drug dependency and self-loathing should ultimately exhibit a more nimble directorial sleight-of-hand than Zemeckis has on display here.
10. “Death Becomes Her” (1992)
We’ve tried so hard to get our heads around the reclamation attempts made for this film that we ended up looking like Meryl Streep with her face on backwards — but to no avail. With the greatest of respect to those commenters who continually maintain what a comedic goldmine this film is, it remains to us a ghoulishly unfunny and quite ugly-looking thin pastiche, the unfortunate epitome of an extremely dated early-’90s aesthetic. Famously the recipient of some dreadful test screening results, which led to long after the fact reshoots (and it looks compromised as a result, never entirely sure what kind of film it’s trying to be), the target of its satire is certainly a ripe one: Hollywood’s obsession with youth and beauty, especially of the feminine kind. Streep stars alongside Goldie Hawn as two image-obsessed frenemies, offered the secret to eternal youth by a magnificently-styled Satanic Isabella Rossellini (appropriately enough, she may be the only thing not to have aged poorly in this film), but who go on to prove that while youth may be wasted on the young, it’s even more so on the middle-aged. Bruce Willis turns in another of a string of overwhelmed early-’90s performances, though it does feel at least like he and Hawn are in the same kitschy flick. As for Streep, who has proved her comic chops elsewhere, it’s not that she’s bad, of course, but she may very well be too good for this material: this is a film in which performance is less important than putty.