The 10 Most Average Movies Ever Made, Ranked
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There's a very specific kind of movie that isn't bad enough to make fun of and isn't good enough to actually recommend. You watch it, you have a perfectly fine time, and by the next morning you've basically forgotten the plot already. It's not that anyone involved did a bad job exactly, it's just that nobody really swung for anything either.
That's this whole list. Not one of these movies made me angry, not one made me want to talk about it afterward, they just sort of happened to me for two hours. Somewhere between good and bad is this weird, forgettable middle zone, and apparently a lot of big-budget movies live there permanently.
10 'Mr. Deeds' (2002)
Adam Sandler plays a small-town pizza shop guy who inherits a massive media company, and pretty much every joke you'd guess is in this movie is actually in this movie. Winona Ryder shows up as a tabloid reporter faking a whole identity just to get his story, and even that twist barely registers.
It's a remake of an old Frank Capra film, which honestly makes the whole thing feel even more like a rough draft of something better that already existed. There's nothing offensively bad here, it's just Sandler doing the exact Sandler thing you already know, competent enough to finish, forgettable enough that I had to look up the plot again just now.
9 'Rampage' (2018)
A giant genetically mutated gorilla, wolf, and crocodile tear through Chicago, and Dwayne Johnson is there to yell at scientists and punch things until the credits roll. It's based on an old arcade game that barely had a plot to begin with, so nobody involved seems too concerned about explaining anything.
Jeffrey Dean Morgan plays the generic shady government guy every movie like this needs somewhere in the cast. This one actually delivers exactly what the poster promises, giant monsters, big city destruction, zero surprises, and that ends up being both fine and completely unmemorable at the same time.
8 'Jungle Cruise' (2021)
Dwayne Johnson and Emily Blunt run a riverboat through the Amazon chasing a magical tree while cursed conquistadors chase them right back, and the whole thing is very obviously trying to be Pirates of the Caribbean without ever quite pulling it off. It's based on a Disney theme park ride, and it kind of shows the plot feels built around set pieces first and a story second.
Jesse Plemons plays the villain with a fun, weird accent, and he's actually one of the more entertaining parts of the movie. Johnson and Blunt actually have decent chemistry together, which almost saves it, but the whole thing still ends up sliding right out of your memory a week later.
7 'Uncharted' (2022)
Tom Holland plays Nathan Drake, a treasure hunter from the video game series, and the movie is something like a decade stuck in development with a rotating cast of directors before anyone actually made it. Mark Wahlberg plays his older partner Sully, and their dynamic is fine, nothing more, nothing less.
The action sequences are competent, a plane cargo fight, a pirate ship hanging off a cliff, but none of it sticks the way an actual good adventure movie should. It's the definition of a movie that exists because a video game was popular, not because anyone had a story they were dying to tell.
6 'The Meg' (2018)
Jason Statham fights a giant prehistoric shark that swims up from the deepest part of the ocean, and that description is basically the entire pitch meeting for this movie. It got toned down to a PG-13 rating, which annoyed some fans who wanted the gorier version the book apparently promised.
It made a lot of money internationally, partly thanks to a co-production deal with China, proof that a big dumb shark movie travels well across borders. There's nothing wrong with it exactly, Statham punches a shark at one point, what more do you actually want, but none of it actually clicks.
Collider Exclusive · Action Franchise Quiz What Action Series Would You Thrive In? Wick · Fast · Mission · Die Hard
Four franchises. Four completely different ideas of what a hero is: the assassin with a code, the family that never leaves anyone behind, the man who does his own stunts, and the guy who simply refuses to die. Only one of them runs on your particular brand of trouble. Eight questions will tell you which one you would survive.
🐕Wick
🏁Fast
🧨Mission
🎄Die Hard
01
How does a room know you've walked into it? Every action hero arrives differently. Some of them arrive before they arrive.
02
It turns physical. What does your fighting actually look like? Choreography is character. Yours says something about you.
03
Who is standing beside you when it starts? Some franchises are built on a team. Others are built on one person walking in alone.
04
It has gone badly wrong. What keeps you upright? Act two exists to find out what you're actually made of.
05
There's a vehicle. What are you driving, and how? No action franchise has ever survived without a car chase. This one is yours.
06
How do you feel about the people giving the orders? There is always an institution. There is rarely a good one.
07
Underneath all of it, what are you actually doing this for? The stunts are the reason people come. This is the reason they stay.
08
When the credits roll, what do people say about you? Every franchise is really an argument about what makes someone worth watching.
Casting Has Been Completed Your Franchise Is…
Four action series. One of them is built around exactly the way you handle pressure, people, and a room that has just gone very quiet. Here is where you would survive the trilogy, and probably headline it.
John Wick
You are precision with a grudge. You don't posture, you don't escalate, and you don't warn anybody twice. That is exactly why the people who know you are so careful never to be the reason you start.
- The Wick films run on discipline: an underworld with actual etiquette, a hero who honours every rule of it, and a world that unravels the instant someone breaks one against him.
- You share that quality. You are extraordinarily reasonable right up to the line, and then completely immovable past it.
- Focus, commitment and sheer will. You'd be the one carrying grief through three sequels and turning it into technique rather than noise.
- People wouldn't call you dangerous. They'd say your name quietly and let that do the work.
Fast & Furious
You understand the thing the whole franchise is secretly about: the cars are spectacular, but the crew is the point. You collect people, you keep them, and you'd drive through a building for any one of them.
- This series went from street racing to orbit without ever changing its actual subject, because loyalty scales and plot doesn't have to.
- You have the same instinct. You build a family out of whoever turns up, and then you defend it past the point of reason.
- You'd thrive here because the franchise rewards exactly your strengths: warmth, nerve, an absolute refusal to leave anyone behind, and a relaxed relationship with physics.
- The mission can wait. The barbecue cannot.
Mission: Impossible
You over-prepare and then take the dangerous part yourself anyway. It looks like control, but it's really responsibility. You have never worked out how to ask somebody else to carry the risk.
- This is the franchise of the plan that collapses on schedule: the team, the mask, the rooftop, and the one person sprinting flat out because sprinting is all that's left.
- You share that refusal to accept an outcome. Told the odds, you treat them as an administrative error.
- You'd thrive here because these films reward competence and loyalty in equal measure. The mission matters, but nobody on the team gets left on the wrong side of a door.
- Some people delegate the cliff. You have never once been that person.
Die Hard
You are not the most trained person in the building, the best equipped, or the one anybody would have picked. You are simply the one still standing at the end, which turns out to be the only qualification that matters.
- Die Hard invented the modern action hero by making him mortal: outgunned, out-planned, bleeding, and extremely funny about it.
- You share that stubbornness. Adversity doesn't make you noble, it makes you sarcastic, and then it makes you unstoppable.
- You'd thrive here because these films reward improvisation and nerve over preparation, and you've never had the luxury of preparing anyway.
- You didn't want any of this. You just declined to be the person who let it happen.
5 'Red Notice' (2021)
Dwayne Johnson, Ryan Reynolds, and Gal Gadot all show up in the same heist movie, and Netflix paid an enormous amount of money to make sure you knew that going in. Critics mostly hated it, but it still became one of the most-watched movies the platform has ever had.
The plot is exactly what you'd expect from three huge stars in one action comedy, double crosses, banter, a globe-trotting chase for stolen treasure. It's the kind of movie you put on in the background while doing something else, which honestly might be the most accurate way to describe half the movies on this list.
4 'The Gray Man' (2022)
Ryan Gosling plays a rogue CIA assassin being hunted by Chris Evans, who's clearly having fun playing against type as a mustached, sadistic villain. The Russo Brothers directed it as Netflix's most expensive movie at the time, and the budget is visible, but the story itself feels like it came out of a spy-thriller vending machine.
It's based on a whole book series, and the movie plays like it's setting up sequels more than actually telling a complete story on its own. Everything is competently shot and competently acted, and that competence is exactly the problem, nothing here takes a single real risk.
3 'Geostorm' (2017)
Gerard Butler has to stop a network of weather-controlling satellites from accidentally destroying the entire planet, which is both an insane premise and also incredibly boring to actually watch play out. The production reportedly needed massive reshoots just to make the movie make basic sense, and you can kind of feel the seams if you're paying attention.
It lost a pretty significant amount of money and became a punchline for bad disaster movies almost immediately after release. Somewhere in here there's probably a fun, campy disaster movie trying to get out, but what actually made it to theaters mostly just sits there being expensive and dull.
2 'Spectre' (2015)
Daniel Craig's fourth Bond movie brings back the classic villain organization SPECTRE, and Christoph Waltz plays Blofeld with a twist reveal that got mocked pretty widely after people actually saw it. It's well made in the technical sense, good stunts, good cinematography, a decent Bond movie skeleton underneath it all.
The problem is it runs way too long for how little story is actually happening, and by the time the big reveal lands, most of the tension has already leaked out of the room. It's not embarrassing the way some Bond movies have been, it's just the most forgettable entry from an otherwise pretty strong run of films.
1 'Austin Powers in Goldmember' (2002)
Mike Myers plays about four different characters in this one, Austin, Dr. Evil, Fat Bastard, and a new gold-plated villain, and the movie is clearly aware it's the third sequel in a franchise that peaked a while ago. Beyoncé shows up as Foxxy Cleopatra, and the whole thing leans hard into jokes about how tired sequels usually get.
Some of the gags still land, Myers is a funny performer even when the material around him is running on fumes. But there's a real difference between a movie being self-aware about its own mediocrity and a movie actually rising above it, and this one mostly just points at the joke instead of going out of its way to be appraisable.
Austin Powers in Goldmember
- Release Date
- July 26, 2002
- Runtime
- 94 minutes
- Director
- Jay Roach
- Writers
- Michael McCullers, Mike Myers
-
Austin Powers / Dr. Evil / Goldmember / Fat Bastard
-
Beyoncé
Foxxy Cleopatra
-
Scott Evil
-
Michael York
Basil Exposition
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