Put on your leather jacket and check out these comic book movies that took themselves way too seriously. Comic book movies are a big deal. We’re lucky enough to live in a time when all of our favorite characters have a pretty good chance to jump from the page to the big screen. This is mostly thanks to films like X-Men and Christopher Nolan's Dark Knight trilogy. But where those films succeeded, they also created a precedent for every comic book movie that followed. Suddenly, every comic book movie was dark and serious. We’ve put together a list of some of the worst offenders of this cliché.
Most of the modern movies that are based on graphic novels have a few things in common. They all have about ten extra gunfights in them and they’re all tinted blue. Now we don’t know why that is, but we guess somewhere along the way “blue tint” became a visual representation of everything that is serious. So cover your smartphone or computer with a blue filter and proceed to read this collection of comic book adaptations that are too serious for their own good.
Vote up the comic book movies that you wish had been more fun and less crushingly serious. If you think we missed the point of these gritty comic book adaptations, let us know with your votes.
http://www.ranker.com/list/serious-comic-book-movies/ranker-comics,
Sin City: A Dame to Kill For
When A Dame To Kill For was announced, surprise was the natural reaction. By 2014, the Sin City, green screen film craze had passed, like Furby's and the Macarena before it. The first movie in the Sin City franchise found a way to replicate the gritty noir of the comics, and the sequel tried to do a whole lot more of what worked the first time .
By getting rid of the over the top comedy that made the first film work, A Dame to Kill For became a smudgy, black and white mess that didn't translate to the big screen.
Spawn
For some reason, lots of comic book fans were expecting a slightly darker version of the early '90s Batman films. They were wrong. Spawn took all the worst parts from the comic (of which is mostly terrible) and put them on display for the world to see. Not only does the movie spend a lot of time in always-rainy alley packed with vagrants, it also takes characters with names like "The Violater," "Malebolgia," and "Cogliostro" as seriously as we would anyone else.
We don't mean to be armchair quarterbacks (even though that's what this list is all about), but if Spawn had leaned in the to ridiculous trappings on the mythology and had more fun with itself, we might be on Spawn V: Rogue Nation by now.
The Punisher
This 2004 Thomas Jane vehicle was meant to be the beginning of a long running Punisher franchise, but Marvel and Lionsgate definitely overestimated how badly America wanted to watch a guy throw burning oil in someone's face before breaking their neck. At just over 2 hours long, The Punisher feels more like an endurance test than a movie.
We know that The Punisher isn't meant to be the nicest character, but unlike the other two Punisher movies, this one takes itself way too seriously. Its predecessor, the first attempt at putting Punisher onscreen, is definitely dark (and features way too much of Dolph Lundgren's butt), but stylistically it skews toward an ironically too-serious tone like some great Korean and Japanese cinema. The 2008 reboot Punisher: Warzone ratchets up the violence of the 2004 adaptation in a way that's cartoonish, offering an almost surrealist take on the character.
V for Vendetta
Fans of the source material wanted to like V For Vendetta, but like every Alan Moore adaptation, it fell short. Instead of the taut yet thoughtful political thriller that we were treated to on the page, we saw a film that was almost gleeful in how much it could torture its female protagonist. The questions about how much we're willing to let our government control our lives were mostly thrown out the window in lieu of slick action scenes and overwritten dialogue that was presumably left on The Matrix's cutting room floor.
One bright spot in this film is Hugo Weaving's portrayal of V. Even though he spends the film behind a Guy Fawkes mask, he's still able to permeate the whole movie with his charismatic presence.
X-Men
Yes, the first X-Men arguably began this golden age of comic book adaptations. But the movie takes itself way too seriously. Not only does the film open in a concentration camp (wasn't the Holocaust fun, kids?) but it also saps any fun that existed in the comics by sticking our somber heroes in black leather jumpsuits. We get it, this ain't your mama's X-Men.
In a comic book universe that's pretty silly, the first X-Men film set a standard that too many subsequent superhero movies have imitated. And even though the series nose-dived a few years later with a mishmash of kitchen sink storylines that killed just about every character (X-Men: The Last Stand), the franchise has rebooted itself into a series that, while still taking itself very seriously, also knows how to have fun.
The Dark Knight Rises
Any of the Christopher Nolan Batman films could be accused of taking themselves too seriously. Since Batman Begins, the strong centers of this trilogy was Bruce Wayne. As a character, he's a man who is at war with himself, and Gotham is a city that's at war with itself too. But in The Dark Knight Rises, a movie about Batman, we don't even see the superhero for the first hour of the film. Instead, we're treated to multiple monologues on the global economic collapse. That's almost as good. Right?
Everybody loves Nolan's trilogy, but when the films begin to take themselves too seriously and try to become allegories for the most serious and horrifying issues facing America, it can be hard to just enjoy all the caped crusading.
The Amazing Spider-Man
Following Sam Raimi's mostly triumphant run on the Spider-Man franchise, the series opted to reboot and not only skew younger, but go much darker. A few news outlets focused on Gwen Stacy's death as one of the many ways that the series was attempting to seem grittier, but we all know that's a part of Spidey's backstory, and if you're going to tell an origin story you might as well tell it right. Our biggest complaint with the darkening of The Amazing Spider-Man was the addition of the storyline about Peter's father as a rogue OsCorp scientist who's assassinated while trying to stop his boss from taking part in shady bioengineering projects.
The reason Spider-Man is one of the most beloved superheroes isn't because his dad was also James Bond. We love Spider-Man because he represents the every day guy and gal. Giving him an origin that essentially turns him into a tougher, moodier version of Johnny Quest erases everything that we liked about him in the first place.
Man of Steel
If there's a character that never needs a gritty reboot, it's Superman. Man of Steel suffers from not only from being a completely joyless and bleak film, but Superman often comes off as less than heroic when he allows his father to die in a tornado, wonders aloud whether he should save humanity, and snaps the bad guy's neck. It's not just the motivations of the characters in Man of Steel that are dark. The actual film itself is so dark that it can be hard to watch.
Giving the film a more desaturated look to make it stand out from its more comic booky cohorts may have made sense as an idea, but it made viewing the final product a bit of a slog.
2 Guns
Unlike a lot of the adaptations on this list, 2 Guns probably faired better by not being connected to the original comic. It's actually a very faithful adaptation of the original series, but you wouldn't know that from any of the press surrounding the film. If you went into this movie not expecting much, that was probably for the best. Where the comic is a breezy, smart buddy cop series, the adaptation takes all of that and dumbs it down into a Wahlberg/Washinton shoot 'em up that feels like a Bad Boys copycat.
Not every comic adaptation with mismatched detectives has to be a clone of every early '90s shoot 'em up.Rather than having fun like, say, 21 Jump Street (not a comic book movie, but a helpful example), 2 Guns doubled down on the grittiness of the modern action genre, abandoning the levity of the original comic series.
Fantastic Four
Why does 20th Century Fox keep trying to force Fantastic Four down the throats of audiences? The newest adaptation of the '60s sci-fi super group may be the most grim superhero movie yet. The film deals with government funding, the militarization of scientific endeavors, and notorious secret "black sites" - unacknowledged government locations where people can be held indefinitely against their will. You know, everything you want from a comic book movie.
Maybe this is Fox's way of trying to match DC's gritty film output, or maybe they just weren't in touch with the source material. Whatever the reason, the most recent Fantastic Four is the apex of unnecessarily dark films.