10 movie lines from 2011 that should be deleted from history
2011 was a relatively stable year for the entertainment industry, in which the box office was up, the remnant consequences of the WGA strike had passed, and there was a healthy mix of genres that were successful all at once.
While there were certainly iconic characters that helped draw in audiences, 2011 was a year when scripts were of the utmost priority among the best films released. The Oscars were handed out to Woody Allen for Midnight in Paris in the ‘Best Original Screenplay’ category and Alexander Payne for The Descendants in the ‘Best Adapted Screenplay’ race, and the ‘Best Picture’ winner, The Artist, found a creative way to write a classic silent film script.
Many of the year’s most welcome surprises were those that were based on completely original, inventive stories, such as Source Code, Attack the Block, Super 8, Rango, Take Shelter, and Warrior, while a few legendary screenwriters made their highly anticipated returns. Aaron Sorkin wrote a great script for Moneyball a year after winning the Oscar for The Social Network, and the accomplished playwright Kenneth Lonergan finally released his second film, Margaret, which had been on the shelf for several years due to editing concerns.
Even the year’s blockbusters had good writing, as Rise of the Planet of the Apes and X-Men: First Class found creative ways to tell prequel stories, but that doesn’t mean that there wasn’t also a fair amount of trash, as no layer of nostalgic tint can make 2011’s worst scripts look any better in retrospect.
10 movie lines from 2011 that shouldn’t exist:
‘The Smurfs’ (Raja Gosnell)
Line: “Smurf, Smurf, Smurfety Smurf!”
Sony is among the most shameless of the major studios when it comes to developing reboots of properties no one wants, and The Smurfs might be their most cynical project to date, a blatant attempt to bring back the brand with a film that could help toy sales. Moreover, the obnoxious phrases uttered by the characters would come to haunt the industry in the form of one of the worst recurring family franchises of all time.
Neil Patrick Harris plays an advertising executive who utters a string of ‘Smurf’ words in a row, which the Smurfs misinterpret as foul language. This is the type of low-brow humour that was plentiful in The Smurfs, and the fact that the franchise continued to expand indicated just how little effort Sony put into projects that were intended to be exclusively for kids.
‘Cars 2’ (John Lassetter)
Line: “Tow Mater, average intelligence”
Pixar had been on an unassailable run of making near-masterpieces up until 2011, as most of the films they’d released thus far were ranked among the best of their respective years. Even if Cars and A Bug’s Life were more moderately received, they were better than a vast majority of other animated films, but that all changed when John Lassetter decided to turn Cars 2 into a spy adventure in the style of the James Bond franchise, and turned the truck Mater (voiced by Larry the Cable Guy) into the protagonist instead of Lightning McQueen (voiced by Owen Wilson).
Using an unintelligent, annoying side character as the centre of the film marked the first time in which Pixar chose cheap jokes for kids over telling a complete story, and it sent the company into a downward spiral of making unnecessary sequels that it still has not recovered from.
‘The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn – Part 1’ (Bill Condon)
Line: “It’s like gravity. Your whole centre shifts. Suddenly, it’s not the Earth holding you here. You would do anything, be anything she needs. A friend, a brother, a protector.”
The Twilight Saga was a baffling phenomenon that seemed to confuse older critics with any sense of taste, as the young audiences who had read the books seemed to assent to anything in the films as long as they were faithful. The most bizarre plot twist in the series occurs in The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn – Part 1, where it is revealed that Taylor Lautner’s Jacob has “imprinted” on the infant hybrid baby of Kristen Stewart’s Bella and Robert Pattinson’s Edward, and has essentially fallen in love.
It’s a completely creepy and unusual bit of lore from the books that simply should have been left out for the sake of making a film adaptation, and its inclusion indicated that Lionsgate valued appealing existing fans of the source material over creating something comprehensible for average audiences.
‘The Zookeeper’ (Frank Coraci)
Line: “Is TGI Fridays as incredible as it looks?”
Kevin James is an actor who is only somewhat tolerable when he’s an ensemble player in Adam Sandler films, but he managed to have a brief stint as a leading man that crashed and burned with 2011’s The Zookeeper. The film stars James as a beloved zoo employee who can’t land a date with his dream girl, which inspires the animals to break their vow of silence to give him advice on how to be more suave.
There’s nothing of value in The Zookeeper, but the most insulating of subplots involves a gorilla, voiced by Nick Nolte, who is obsessed with going to TGI Fridays. It is well-known that nearly all of the Happy Madison films are highly funded because of their lucrative advertising partners, but the fact that TGI Fridays is an actual plot point in The Zookeeper is an entirely new low.
‘Green Lantern’ (Martin Campbell)
Line: “To infinity and beyond! By the power of Grayskull!”
Ryan Reynolds has spent the last 15 years lampooning his work in Green Lantern, which actually doesn’t look that bad when compared to some of his recent work and much more memorable than Red Notice, The Adam Project, If, and Free Guy. Although Reynolds is actually pretty well cast as Hal Jordan, the film does make some mistakes when it tries to acknowledge the inherently goofy nature of the Green Lantern mythology, and specifically how the rings grant each of the Lanterns power.
A line in which Jordan tries to activate his ring by making references to Toy Story and Masters of the Universe might have only been mildly irritating at the time, but it reflected a style of meta, self-referential humour that Reynolds would turn into his brand in the post-Deadpool era.
‘Mr Popper’s Penguins’ (Mark Waters)
Line: “Why are you hitting yourself, huh? Why are you hitting yourself? That’s not attractive for a zoo official.”
Jim Carrey has always been a divisive actor who is beloved and hated in equal regard, but the beginning of the 2010s saw him completely sell out and avoid any sort of creative projects like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind or The Truman Show. There’s something very depressing in the fact that Carrey, who is known for playing larger-than-life goofballs, had to settle for playing a boring dad in a family film about penguins.
Mr Popper’s Penguins takes what was a fairly beloved children’s novel and turns it into a slapstick comedy in which Carrey gets to pull the “why are you hitting yourself?” gag with creepy-looking CGI penguins. It was a good thing that he took a break from acting a few years later, as getting to be part of the Sonic the Hedgehog franchise seemed to revive his creativity.
‘We Bought A Zoo’ (Cameron Crowe)
Line: “Because it’s a good dream! And it’s got cool animals in it and some pretty great people, too!”
Cameron Crowe was once a legendary filmmaker known for writing sincere, funny stories about romance and family, who was praised for being able to write authentic moments, but his scripts since Almost Famous have started to feel cloying and obnoxiously quirky, and he has been on a downward spiral for the last 25 years.
We Bought A Zoo isn’t necessarily as bad as Aloha or as misguided as Elizabethtown, but it does feel like the type of generic family comedy that didn’t need his touch. A line from Matt Damon’s character, a widower who purchases a zoo, is a painful attempt at giving him a “you complete me” scene that just doesn’t connect. Damon’s monologue was so widely mocked that it became the butt of a joke when he appeared with Jimmy Kimmel at the Oscars in 2017.
‘Drive Angry’ (Patrick Lussier)
Line: “Fire isn’t the worst part. It’s the video feed. It’s not about your suffering, your burning. It’s about the suffering of those you love, because that’s all you see in full detail, and there’s nothing you can do to shut it off.“
Nicolas Cage has been open enough about how his financial issues caused him to do a number of B-movies, starting at the beginning of the 2010s, that mostly went direct to home media and VOD services, and one of these was Drive Angry, an odd film that wasn’t quite polished enough to be a cheesy exploitation film, yet wasn’t nearly competent enough to be taken seriously.
Cage is great when he plays eccentric roles where he gets to infuse a lot of his personality, but he’s weirdly miscast as the ridiculously-named getaway driver Milton, who spends a majority of the film muttering as he sits behind the wheel of his car. The brief instance in which the film tries to give him a tragic backstory, allowing him to explain how his daughter and son-in-law were murdered, was confirmation to the world that Cage had sold out.
‘Gnomeo & Juliet’ (Kelly Ashbury)
Line: “The story you are about to see has been told before. A lot”
While the plays of William Shakespeare have served as a loose inspiration for a number of children’s animated films, most notably The Lion King as an adaptation of Hamlet, those that directly refer to the original text seem to always fail because they can’t commit to the bleakness of ‘The Bard’ and his views on humanity. Romeo & Juliet is a classic romantic tragedy that has inspired a number of great reinterpretations, such as West Side Story, and there was absolutely no need for an animated film, especially if it was about garden gnomes.
A good rule of thumb is that any film that opens with a phrase along the lines of “the story you are about to see” isn’t going to provide much new context to the original material. In all likelihood, the kids watching Gnomeo & Juliet don’t care about Shakespeare anyway.
‘Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close’ (Stephen Daldry)
Line: “I’m sure people tell you this constantly, but if you look under ‘incredibly beautiful’ in the dictionary, there’s a picture of you”.
The Academy Awards survived a number of controversies before expanding their ‘Best Picture’ lineup to ten nominees for the 2010 ceremony, with the thought that there would be more room to acknowledge works from other genres. That logic evaporated completely when Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close was nominated for ‘Best Picture’, a negatively reviewed piece of shameless Oscar bait that managed to sneak in over deserving titles like Drive, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Beginners, and Warrior.
Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close is a manipulative attempt to use the 9/11 tragedy to evoke sympathy for a lonely boy who lost his father, but nearly all of its truisms about life are as complex as the messages within a sympathy card. Its nomination was enough to indicate that sticking to five nominees for ‘Best Picture’ might have been a better idea.
