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It was Morbin' Time back in 2003.
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00:00Movies can get away with being many things, but no studio wants their latest release to
00:05be dismissed as dated and old hat from the moment the first trailer drops.
00:11Hollywood wants to constantly be wowing audiences with the newest hotness, because nothing dense
00:16a movie's box office like the general population thinking it looks quaint, corny, and just plain
00:23old behind the times. But every so often, a series of miscalculations conspire to deliver a film that
00:31feels totally out of time, like it somehow traveled through a cinematic wormhole and wound up in cinemas
00:38years after its intended bow. 10. The Internship
00:49Remember the Internship? Yeah, this glorified feature-length product placement for Google,
00:55starring Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson as middle-aged salesmen who take internships at the tech giant,
01:02couldn't feel more mid-2000s if it tried. Except it came out in 2013, a fact The Onion made hilarious
01:11light of by dubbing it, quote, the biggest comedy of 2005. Oh, oh, actually that'll sound even better
01:18in the old movie trailer voices we used to get. The biggest comedy of 2005.
01:25Indeed, given that in 2013 the internet wasn't quite the mysterious dial-up connection beast
01:32middle-aged folk that it was in the early to mid-2000s, The Internship felt like a dusty relic
01:38the moment it was announced. Between the poor reviews and mediocre box office, it's easy to see
01:44how this project probably would have done gangbusters had it released between 2003 and 2006, back when
01:52the general population was considerably less tech literate, pre-smartphones and all, and Vaughn and
01:58Wilson were at the peaks of their fame. 9. Black Widow
02:03Ever since Natasha Romanoff aka Black Widow, played by Scarlett Johansson, was first introduced to the
02:09Marvel Cinematic Universe in 2010's Iron Man 2, fans assumed it was just a mere matter of time before
02:16the character got her own spin-off. Though it was often suggested that Marvel Studios was anxious
02:21about greenlighting a female-led superhero film given the prior failures of projects like Catwoman
02:28and Elektra, there was certainly considerable fan interest in seeing Black Widow get her own
02:34born-style spy thriller. And it finally happened in 2021, but the big problem? Black Widow had died
02:43two years prior in Avengers Endgame, and so the film was forced to be a prequel side story that took
02:49place primarily after Captain America Civil War. To be clear, Marvel had just released the most
02:56climactic superhero film to date, followed it up by going backwards. By 2021, a Black Widow movie
03:04felt like a quaint afterthought, closing the cinematic door after the horse had bolted, or rather
03:11yeeted itself off the Vormir Mountains. Given that Romanoff's fate was already known and Endgame had
03:18quite decisively shut the book on the character, a common criticism of Black Widow was that it should
03:23have been made about five years earlier when Natasha was still, you know, alive.
03:298. Gemini Man For all of its attempts to push
03:33filmmaking quote unquote forward by being filmed at 120 frames per second in 3D, Ang Lee's Gemini Man
03:42feels like a sci-fi thriller that tripped and fell straight out of 1997. And that's because,
03:49in a sense, it did. The pitch for Gemini Man first started doing the rounds in Hollywood in 1997,
03:56after which a number of actors that were starring in it, including Harrison Ford,
04:01Sean Connery, Nicolas Cage, and Clint Eastwood. It ultimately didn't start shooting until decades
04:07later in 2018, with Lee directing Will Smith in the dual role of an assassin and his younger clone,
04:13achieved here with cutting edge visual effects tech. And yet, despite this, the chintzy
04:20assassin-vites-himself premise and the particulars of the script would have felt right at home in your
04:25typical mid-90s bargain bin VHS rental. This one just happened to have an $138 million budget
04:33and no Jean-Claude Van Damme, which is a huge, huge loss in my opinion. As a fitting addendum to the
04:40whole matter though, Lee recently confirmed that he won't be shooting films in 3D or high frame rate
04:46ever again, and honestly, thank god. 7. Crash 2004
04:52It's incredibly telling that race relations drama Crash had its origins in 1991, when writer and
05:00director Paul Haggis was the victim of a carjacking by two black men in Los Angeles. This prompted
05:07Haggis to develop his film about racial and social tensions in LA, as was eventually released in 2005,
05:15and controversially went on to win the Best Picture Oscar, pipping easy favourite Brokeback Mountain to
05:22the post. While Crash is often derided today as one of the all-time weakest Best Picture winners,
05:29even back in 2005, it felt like a simplistic engagement with its subject matter. The sort of
05:35heavy-handed message movie that regularly won Oscars and tore up the box office throughout the 1980s and
05:421990s. In a year where Crash was up against not just Brokeback but terrific films like Capote,
05:48Goodnight and Good Luck and Munich, its award success felt even more like a puzzling throwback to a bygone
05:56era. 6. Clerks 3
05:59Kevin Smith's long-awaited Clerks 3 sequel didn't merely feel a bit passe because it once again saw the
06:05filmmaker peering back over his shoulder to consider his past but also because it featured a jokey
06:11subplot centred around NFTs. Yeah I mean I forgot these things existed again so I'm not happy with
06:20being reminded that they were a thing. Smith, who is enough of a proponent of NFTs that he even released
06:26a movie Killroy was here exclusively as one has Elias played by Trevor Furman and his friend Blockchain
06:35played by Austin Zajur trying to sell NFT kites throughout Clerks 3. Now even if the mere mention
06:43of non-fungible tokens doesn't make you groan, this movie came out in September 2022 at a point where NFTs
06:53had already peaked in popularity and were dying on the vine. By 2023 the majority of them had become
07:01totally worthless which I'm sure is still keeping Seth Green up at night. Seriously anyone if you've
07:07seen his apes let him know because he was super upset about that. 5. The Little Things
07:14Despite starring three Oscar winners in Denzel Washington, Jared Leto and Rami Malek, only one of
07:21whom actually deserves to have any Oscars. The Little Things came and went in 2021 without much
07:27of a peep and it can't solely be blamed on Warner Brothers decision to send it to HBO Max the very
07:32same day it hits cinemas. Also for clarity's sake I'm talking about Denzel Washington he deserves all
07:38the Oscars in the world but Jared Leto and Rami Malek? No. Anyway one common sentiment among reviews
07:46of the little things was that the crime thriller felt like a straight face throwback to the 1990s
07:51where modest thrillers about serial killers routinely made bank at the box office off the back of their
07:56lead actors. Think of something like Kiss the Girls or Along Came a Spider, that kind of thing. As such
08:03it's a little surprise to learn that writer and director John Lee Hancock penned the first draft of
08:08the script way back in 1993. Shortly after The Silence of the Lambs astronomical success prompted
08:15everyone in Hollywood to get to work on their own copycat projects. Though Steven Spielberg,
08:20Clint Eastwood, Warren Beatty and Danny DeVito all considered directing at various points,
08:26it ultimately fell to Hancock himself to resurrect the project almost 30 years later and get it made.
08:32It's certainly not a bad movie all things considered, it's just one that fails to stand out in an era
08:38where commanding audience interest is more challenging than ever before and star power has never meant
08:44less to the general moviegoer. If you saw the little things airing on cable while channel surfing in 1998
08:51though, you probably would have had a great time. 4. Jason Bourne
08:56The Bourne movies came along and redefined the spy genre in the early 2000s, starting with Doug Liman's
09:02The Bourne Identity before the series was passed to Paul's Shaky Cam Is My True Love Greengrass
09:08with The Bourne Supremacy and The Bourne Ultimatum. Soon enough, the Matt Damon-led series spawned a
09:14host of imitators, clearly providing the visual and tonal blueprint for Martin Campbell's brilliant
09:20James Bond reboot, Casino Royale. Bourne had concluded pretty definitively in 2007
09:26with Ultimatum. We watched as Jason uncovered his past and took down Treadstone and left the cinema
09:32to the sounds of Moby, well, and truly satisfied with the film as a trilogy capper. And then there
09:38was a spin-off. A fairly decent film in and of itself, directed by Michael Clayton's Tony Gilroy,
09:43with attempts at franchising Bourne still felt contrived, a feeling that wasn't shaking when it was
09:49announced that Greengrass and Damon would be returning for a follow-up to Ultimatum called
09:54Jason Bourne, which released in 2016, almost a full decade after the previous film.
10:01The fourth mainline Bourne film stood out as dated as soon as it dropped, with Greengrass deploying
10:07all the same tools from the preceding efforts, but with no thematic or emotional impetus for it to land.
10:13It felt like an unnecessary addition when it was announced and remained that way when it was released.
10:18Number 3. Morbius Oh, Morbius.
10:22Even accepting that every entry into Sony's Spider-Man universe to date has given off a
10:27pronounced whiff of the early 2000s, none of them feel quite as aggressively instaraged as Morbius.
10:35Morbius feels like it comes from a small pocket of time for superhero movies between 2003 and 2005,
10:43a Daredevil adjacent kind of film where they could still be thoroughly naff and yet still have something
10:50of a pop culture imprint. And beyond this, its slick vampiric action seemed of a piece with the
10:56Underworld franchise, which itself launched back in 2003. Toss in Tyrese Gibson as a wisecracking
11:03comic relief cop and it's easy to look at the film, released in 2022 as it was, and twice, and ask
11:11yourself what year is it? Number 2. The Core. Without checking, just try and guess what year
11:17sci-fi disaster film The Core came out in. 1995? 1996? Maybe 1997? Nope. 2003. With its hilariously loony premise,
11:29of a drill team racing to detonate nuclear weapons to restart the rotation of the Earth's core,
11:35HELL YEAH! This is a film that, in its very bones, feels like it's riding the coattails of
11:41countless 1990s disaster flicks like Independence Day, Armageddon, Deep Impact, Daylight, Dante's Peak,
11:48Volcano, and so on. Oh, and also let me know which one of those movies is your favorite down in the
11:53comments below. I'm always going to be riding or dying for Independence Day, cause that thing,
11:58oh, that is a real movie. But back to the core, and with the most late 90s slash early 2000s cast
12:05imaginable, including Aaron Eckhart, Hilary Swank, Delroy Lindo, Stanley Tucci, DJ Qualls,
12:12Richard Jenkins, Bruce Greenwood, and Alfred Woodward, accompanied by some hilariously wretched CGI,
12:20even for its release year, the core felt like a film Paramount just left in their studio vault
12:25for a few years by accident. And yeah, though the disaster genre was still incredibly popular
12:31at this point in time, The Day After Tomorrow grossed over $500 million in 2004 just a year
12:37later, the core was a colossal box office flop, its innate datedness seemingly deterring paying
12:44moviegoers from checking it out. 1. Bloodshot
12:48It feels like Vin Diesel's superhero flick Bloodshot came out at least a decade ago,
12:54when in fact, it was released just four years back in 2020. Now, we can't solely blame this
13:01on Bloodshot being one of the last major Hollywood movies to release before the time warping pandemic,
13:07but also because it seems precisely like the sort of high concept nonsense Diesel would have starred
13:12in from the early 2000s through to the 2010s. Take Diesel's schlockiest star vehicles from that era,
13:19the Chronicles of Riddick, Babylon AD, and more recently, The Last Witch Hunter,
13:24and Bloodshot sits very comfortably among them. Perhaps fitting given that the comic source material
13:29launched all the way back in 1992. Except this movie was filmed in 2018 and released with visual effects
13:37which looked at least a solid decade behind the times, if not even more. Bloodshot feels like it
13:43comes from a time when Hollywood was still embarrassed of superhero movies. And so, in light of the huge
13:49artistic strides the genre has made over the last 15 years, it's almost hilariously quaint to sit through.
Recommended
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