Though the third Fast and the Furious installment, Tokyo Drift, wasn’t a huge box office disappointment with its $63 million domestic gross, it was significantly less successful than its predecessors, The Fast and the Furious ($145 million) and 2 Fast 2 Furious ($127 million). A fourth film would normally see an even bigger drop in box office receipts, but next week’s Fast & Furious has a good chance of actually being the highest-grossing film in the series yet, due to the return of original cast members Paul Walker, Michelle Rodriguez, Jordanna Brewster and, most importantly, Vin Diesel.

With the expectation that Fast & Furious will be enough of a hit to save the franchise, we take a look at ten other films that similarly kept their respective series going, either because of an increase in profits or a surprising increase in quality, following one or many disappointing installments.
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Should special effects only be used to service a film’s story, or is it perfectly fine for movies to feature extraneous spectacle? That’s a debate that comes up often among cineastes, but ultimately there’s room for both functions. Sometimes, in cases like Jurassic Park and The Matrix, both categories of effects may even faultlessly coexist in the same film. Yet there is one kind of effects employment that’s intolerable to all film-loving parties: the gratuitous exploitation for the sole purpose of brazen gimmickry. It’s this kind of effects work that goes beyond spectacle. It’s not so much a show as a show off.

For one example of this cinematic sin check out Karina’s review of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, in which she references a scene featuring an inessential and irrelevant rocket launch in the background of an otherwise intimate moment between two lovers on a sailboat. Actually, that’s apparently only a minor citation in a “a film about the feat of its own whiz-bang, Frankensteinian digital imagery, drunk on its own accomplishment to an extent that feels quasi-ethical.” Hardly the first movie to commit such a crime, sure, but Benjamin Button seems to be the most thoroughly guilty exploiter since Forrest Gump (both films, incidentally, were scripted by Eric Roth).

So, in (dis)honor of Roth’s repeat offense, let’s take a short look at the worst exploitations of special effects in the last 15 years:
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Over the weekend, Wanted had a 100% fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes.com. It’s since gone down to 81% (at the time of this writing — and with top critics it’s down to 67%), though that’s still pretty good for a movie that initially looked like just another Matrix knockoff.

But will the good reviews make for great box office? Last night, while viewing the latest trailer in a theater with some friends, I mentioned that Wanted was receiving great reviews. Nobody believed me at first, and then they didn’t care; they still thought it looked terrible.

Good reviews rarely help an action movie, and bad reviews rarely deter audiences from seeing them. However, if we look at the top 5 most critically acclaimed action movies, it’s clear that people do often prefer a good action film to a bad one. The next 5, on the other hand…

1. The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King (2003)
   Rotten Tomatoes’ “T-Meter” score: 94% (top critics: 98%)
   All Time Domestic Box Office Rank: #9 ($377 million)
   Sample Critic Quote: “The film event of the millennium.” (Richard Corliss, Time)
   My Analysis: In terms of both reviews and gross, it is possible that, yes, this final LOTR film was the film event of the millennium only three years in. It even won the Oscar for Best Picture, as well as ten other Academy Awards. However, we do have a few hundred years left, and Corliss’ assessment is likely to be challenged one of these centuries.
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