‘Maximum Overdrive‘ is, by all quantitative measures, a terrible film. Taking a Stephen King short story that never quite puts itself together and extending it to feature-length, it is full of scenery-chewing performances (Yeardley Smith stands out as particularly over-the-top), nonsensical plot points, and best of all an anticlimactic ending that wraps up the threat with a footnote. Still, there is one good thing about it: The visual of the giant Green Goblin head on the front of the Happy Toyz big rig is legitimately chilling, a terrifying element that seems imported from another, scarier film, leading us to today’s singular query…
The MS-QOTD (pronounced, as always, “misquoted”) reminds Spoilerites that even the worst comic book ever made contains a really cool design for the main character’s costume, asking: What’s one good thing that stands out as well-executed in otherwise unremarkable bits of pop culture?
2 Comments
The one that jumps out immediately is the lightsaber fight from the end of The Phantom Menace. The music, the choreography, the setpieces… everything about that scene is great in an otherwise mediocre movie.
For a less obvious one, I’ll say the sequence in Passengers where Chris Pratt’s character starts to consider waking up Jennifer Lawrence’s character to ease his loneliness even though it will doom here to a life alone on the ship with him. It sets up a great premise that the movie never manages to pay off in a satisfying way. It seems like the script suffered either from too many rewrites or too much studio meddling. That part of the movie sets up something that seems like it was meant to be darker in tone, but what we got instead was just tonally all over the place.
It’s not so much that the sequence itself is great, it’s more about what the sequence promises that the movie never delivers on.
I agree on Phantom Menace. Same goes with 2 round Jango vs Obi-Wan match. That disco stick galore arena has not aged well.