“Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps” (2010)
On the whole, sequels come from the blockbuster or comedy worlds: awards-friendly dramas tend to tell complete stories, and eschew cash-grab follow-ups, depriving us of “The Imitation Game 2: Imitate Harder,” “Birdman Begins” and “2 Extremely Loud 2 Incredibly Close.” But after nearly 25 years, the 2008 financial crash seemed to suggest that Oliver Stone had more to say about the financial world, and so “Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps,” the sequel to 1987’s “Wall Street,” the film that won Michael Douglas the Best Actor Oscar, came to be. Ironically, it seemed that the real motivation behind the film’s existence was, pure and simple, cash. The film sees Gordon Gekko (Douglas) released from jail and hoping to reunite with his estranged daughter (Carey Mulligan), taking a new protege under his wing in the shape of her boyfriend (Shia LaBeouf). He wants to take down a rival trader (Josh Brolin) who caused the suicide of his employer (Frank Langella), and it’s not that there wasn’t anything to say about the shadiness of the finance world — “Margin Call,” “The Wolf Of Wall Street” and “The Big Short” have all done so to impressive effect. But Stone returns to direct from a pretty lousy Allan Loeb’s script, which is mostly happy to replay the Mephistophelean dynamic of the original, while Stone also fatally softens Douglas’ character, throws in absurd, out-of-nowhere nods to the original (a cameo from Charlie Sheen, reprising his role, stops the film dead in its tracks), so that it generally just feels like a lazy Xerox. Maybe people would have wanted a version of a “Wall Street” sequel, but not like this. Not like this.
“The Huntsman: Winter’s War” (2016)
“Alice Through The Looking Glass” is not just not the first time we’ve ever thought ‘Really? Do we have to?” about a sequel — it’s not even the first time this summer. Earlier in 2016, “The Huntsman: Winter’s War” trundled into theaters to general puzzlement and limp notices, and trundled out again a couple of weeks later having made about $40m profit — little enough that we aren’t in danger of another installment. But then, even the original film, “Snow White and the Huntsman” had been a kind of “Wha?” property — a “gritty” reimagining of the ‘Grimm Brothers‘ story, released a month after the more classically fairytale-ish “Mirror Mirror” and seemingly designed solely as a vehicle for emerging megastar Kristen Stewart. Its near-$400m haul suggests it was a gamble worth taking, but it must have been largely Stewart’s fanbase who juiced those numbers, because even with a returning Huntsman in Chris Hemsworth and a cast groaning with terrific actresses (Charlize Theron reprising villain Ravenna, plus new additions Emily Blunt, Jessica Chastain and supporting-cast MVP Sheridan Smith) ‘Winter’s War’ flopped hard and dully. It doesn’t help that the story, which has to work around an uncomfortable seven-year gap where the events of the first movie take place, and the absence of Stewart whose character is only seen as a reflection or from behind, still manages to feel so derivative. What new there is here is essentially a “Frozen” knock-off: “Do You Want To Build A Huntsman” anyone?
“xXx: State Of The Union” (2005)
When he became an unlikely action star with the success of the first “Fast & Furious” movie, Vin Diesel got a whole action franchise built around him in the shape of “xXx,” which hoped to be a James Bond for the 21st century: a badass, rule-breaking, extreme-sports loving superspy. The film did pretty well, taking $300 million worldwide, but its pandering always had a whiff of Steve Buscemi in a backwards baseball cap carrying a skateboard, and it was overshadowed by the arrival of Jason Bourne. Despite the success, the initially franchise-shy Diesel declined to return for a sequel, but producers pressed on anyway, with Ice Cube replacing him as a new NSA agent who doesn’t care about anything, man. Here, the setting is notorious extreme-sports hotbed Washington D.C., with Cube’s Darius Stone enlisted by Samuel L. Jackson’s spy-boss to prevent a coup being planned by Secretary of Defense Willem Dafoe. The script, by future “Star Wars” and “X-Men” bigwig Simon Kinberg, makes the baffling decision to put Cube and his Poochie-style attitude in the middle of a Tom Clancy story, and Lee Tamahori (who sunk Bond a few years earlier with “Die Another Day”) directs things with the same leaden, uninspired feel he brought to that. And even with the low bar set by Diesel, Cube seems disengaged: only that he’s frequently stood next to charisma drainpipe Scott Speedman who redeems the performance. The film took just a quarter of its predecessor’s haul at the box office, and seemed to killed the series dead (though next year’s threequel will attempt to revive it).
“Ghost Rider: Spirit Of Vengeance” (2012)
It is actually a source of some sadness to have to admit that the sequel to Mark Steven Johnson‘s widely unloved “Ghost Rider” is not, even in a tortuously ironic, so-terrible-it’s-ace way, any good. And that’s because if anyone was going to be able to reclaim the absolutely batshit spirit of the character from the journeyman hands of Johnson, it should have been directors Neveldine/Taylor who made arguably the apotheosis of high-octane bad-taste trash filmmaking with “Crank” then topped even themselves with “Crank II: High Voltage.” But ‘Spirit of Vengeance’ — and this is borderline incomprehensible considering how frenetically it’s cut together and how it has a scene in which leather-clad flaming skull demon Ghost Rider does indeed piss fire “like a flamethrower” — is a crashing bore, full of indifferent shaky action set-pieces, muted explosions and utterly charmless performances. Also shot with a kind of “baby’s first 3D movie” approach to the format, in which things get relentlessly thrown into your face, like shrapnel, fireballs and bullets spat out of Ghost Rider’s mouth, it’s ugly in a way that isn’t even a little bit fun, and even Nicholas Cage in a role he may very well have been born to play, can’t save it. Also representing career nadirs for the usually reliable likes of Ciaran Hinds (replacing Peter Fonda) as the Devil, Christopher Lambert as a monk and Idris Elba as a character whose sole function is to tell another character that he needs to find a third character, ‘Spirit of Vengeance’ is all-round dispiriting even for those of us not invested in the comics. We can only imagine how the diehard fans must feel.
“Basic Instinct 2: Risk Addiction” (2006)
Some sequels feel uncalled-for because the original movie was itself poorly received, or poorly conceived, but that is hardly the case here, with Paul Verhoeven‘s 1992 erotic thriller essentially defining the genre to the tune of $350m worldwide and immediately carving a place for itself in Home Video lore as containing probably the most slo-mo-rewatched shot of all time. But its sequel, coming along 14 years later feels like a kind of “And another thing…” follow-up to an argument you’d long forgotten ever even having — an uninspired watered-down copy of an enjoyably daft original made when everyone involved was certainly old enough to know better. Sharon Stone reprises her role as devious psychopathic bisexual horndog Catherine Tramell, only this time she’s unleashing her pathology and uncrossing her legs all over London, where she is assigned a therapist (David Morrissey) who becomes gradually more susceptible to her psychosexual mind games. Never mind that the plot is completely ridiculous (that was also the case with the first one) nor even that Morrissey makes a poor substitute for Michael Douglas (who’d refused to return for the long-gestating sequel from the outset). The real problem here is that writers Leora Barish and Henry Bean are no Joe Esterhaz and director Michael Caton-Jones is no Verhoeven. Where the first film had a licorice-black sense of humor, ‘Risk Addiction’ has an awkward smirk, Tramell’s femme fatale-ish flourishes feel silly rather than transgressive, and the rather mundane backdrop just makes you come over all English and wish everyone would stop embarrassing themselves.
This practice is a common enough occurrence that we may well return to it in future (as a kind of sequel no one is asking for), but there were a few other titles we considered writing about this time out, including: “Caddyshack 2,” “U.S. Marshals,” “The Whole Ten Yards,” “Staying Alive,””Analyze That,” “Grease 2,” “Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights,” “Evan Almighty,” “Tron: Legacy, ” ” The Two Jakes,” “The Sting 2” and “Escape from LA.” And that’s not even getting into the many, many other titles that are rather predictably sequelized but then end up with us retroactively wishing we’d never granted the first film the kind of reception that made a sequel look like a good idea, such as “Speed 2: Cruise Control,” “Sin City: A Dame To Kill For,” and that special circle of WTF hell that is reserved for “The Boondock Saints 2.” Let us know the last time a sequel didn’t just irritate or depress you but actually confused the hell out of you as to why it existed, in the comments below.
