The two 2003 movies Stephen Fry can’t stand: “I couldn’t believe how appalling that was”
Just because he’s famed for being a supremely intelligent man, it doesn’t mean that Stephen Fry spends his time watching movies that are exclusively designed to appeal to intellectuals.
While it’s easy to imagine him sitting there in an ornate leather armchair, sipping on a large brandy in a darkened room, watching obscure black-and-white existential dramas from decades past, which he may or may not do, the actor, comedian, and TV personality has a broad range of tastes.
On one hand, Stephen Fry likes exactly the sort of films you’d expect Stephen Fry to like, with Powell and Pressburger’s 1942 classic, The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, his all-time favourite, and some of his other most cherished titles hail from the same time period, so he’s got a soft spot for old British flicks.
He’s mentioned The Dam Busters, The Lion in Winter, The Railway Children, and Kind Hearts and Coronets as others he’s fond of, and because all self-confessed cinephiles are obligated to have at least one seminal picture in common that they adore, The Godfather is his go-to American masterpiece.
However, and this might not even come as that much of a surprise, seeing as he was in Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes sequel, Spice World, Thunderpants, and two of Peter Jackson’s Hobbit movies, he’s also got a soft spot for big-budget trash. He still has to draw the line somewhere, though, and a pair of infamous 2003 releases left him bemused by how bad they were.
“The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, I just couldn’t,” he confessed. “I just started staring at it, thinking, ‘This is a joke. It’s going to stop, and then the real film is going to start.'” He wasn’t alone on that front, with the comic book adaptation such a nightmare that it forced Sean Connery into retirement.
There was even a theme, with Fry’s other pick for the nadir of that year’s blockbuster offerings also becoming a painful source of regret for its leading man. “Similarly, with Daredevil, I couldn’t believe how appalling that was,” he added. “And I’m usually a sucker for all these kinds of actioners.”
Just like Connery and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Ben Affleck loathes Daredevil with a deep and burning passion, so at least the two woeful turds that Fry despised had something in common, even if it amounted to nothing but cold, hard regrets, and in the former’s case, self-imposed Hollywood exile.
He’s entitled to feel that way because both of those films are indeed the drizzling shits, and he’s far from alone, since the list of folks who’d agree with him stretches well beyond each picture’s top-billed star.
