The 10 Worst English-Language Movies Made By Good Foreign Directors

On paper, The Last Stand never sounded like a good thing. For one, it's the comeback project for action movie star Arnold Schwarzenegger's resurrected film career, which, keep in mind, is happening during the year when he and his aging body will turn 66-years-old. His co-stars include Johnny Knoxville and Luis Guzman, two funny guys who don't exactly scream "action flick sidekicks" (do recall how it turned out when Rob Schneider assisted Sylvester Stallone in Demolition Man). And, lastly the film's trailers and commercials all hinge on a moment when, after crashing through a diner's window, the former Governator is asked how he's feeling, to which he simply says, "Old." Go ahead, slap those knees!

Now that we've seen The Last Stand, however, we're happy to report that it's actually a great deal of fun. The whiz-bang moments are inventive and feel fresh, the tone is self-aware and comical, and, somehow, Schwarzenegger comes across as cool. So how could this have possibly happened? Hats off to director Kim Jee-woon, the critically lauded South Korean filmmaker who's making his Hollywood debut here. Although The Last Stand isn't as exceptional as Jee-woon's best movies produced in Korea (A Tale of Two Sisters, The Good, the Bad, the Weird, I Saw the Devil), it's still one of the slicker and most easily enjoyable action pics to emerge from the Hollywood machine in quite some time.

To think, it could've been a lot worse for Mr. Jee-woon, considering that so many of his international peers have damaged their reputations with painfully inferior American films over the years. Just how rotten are we talking? Have a look at The 10 Worst English-Language Movies Made By Good Foreign Directors.

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Written by Matt Barone (@MBarone)

Director: Susanne Bier
Country of origin: Denmark

Back home in Denmark, filmmaker Susanne Bier kept critics enthralled from 2002 through 2006 with a trio of raw, compelling, character-powered dramas, most notably the 2004 film Brothers, which was remade (with Jake Gyllenhaal, Natalie Portman, and Tobey Maguire) stateside in 2009, with the same title. So, naturally, it was only a matter of time before Hollywood studios recruited her to enhance their own small-scale, intimate movies. If only she'd been given material that was worth her energy.

Not that she's entirely without fault when it comes to the well-intentioned but formulaic 2007 flick Things We Lost in the Fire. Helped by efficient performances from stars Halle Berry and Benicio del Toro, Bier's English-language debut generates as much emotion as it can from the acting before, ironically, buckling under the script's weightlessness. Heavy-handed when it needs to be subtly evocative, Things We Lost in the Fire, as an ineffective whole, squanders its best pieces, namely Ms. Bier.

Director: Alexandre Aja
Country of origin: France

If you're astute, you'll detect a recurring issue throughout this countdown: international filmmakers getting hired by Hollywood to direct remakes of Asian horror hits. In theory, French splatter champion Alexandra Aja made sense to join the fold, having previously re-imagined Wes Craven's The Hills Have Eyes and turned it into one of the most impressive horror reboots of all time. His method: Modernize Craven's dated film with heightened gore, less camp, and B-list actors delivering A-grade performances.

But when it came to remixing South Korean director Kim Sung-ho's 2003 effort Into the Mirror, Aja couldn't decide what the fuck he wanted to make. At times, the Kiefer Sutherland-led Mirrors strives to be a claustrophobic, atmospheric chamber piece; other times, though, it's an over-the-top slaughterhouse, depicting characters slashing their throats and ripping their jaws apart with bare hands.

Had Aja gone full-hog with the bloodiness (like he did in his 2003 debut, High Tension), Mirrors might've been able to transcend its clunky script. As it stands, the film is a low-point for an otherwise formidable genre voice.

Director: Fernando Meirelles
Country of origin: Brazil

Nobody could ever say that Fernando Meirelles didn't have strong source material to work with while adapting Portuguese author José Saramago's excellent, chilling 1995 novel Blindness. Written with minimal punctuation, flowing like one long, hypnotically engrossing thought, Saramago's book delves deep into its characters motivations and psyches as they try to navigate a world that's suddenly been stricken with widespread sight-deprivation. A challenging proposition for a film, no doubt, yet one that could work if delicately handled.

As in, the polar opposite way of that executed by Meirelles ( who broke through in 2002 with the phenomenal Brazilian gangster flick City of God). Despite its A-grade cast (led by Julianne Moore and Mark Ruffalo), the director's version of Blindness is a smug, unfeeling mess that harps on the novel's darkest moments without retaining any of its emotion or key character-development scenes. An unfortunate example of style over substance, the film signaled Meirelles' sad downfall—last year, he returned with the equally pretentious and insufferable drama 360.

Directors: David Moreau and Xavier Palud
Country of origin: France

Following Alexandre Aja's exceptional 2003 gore flick High Tension, French horror cinema was all the rage, producing several gems (Inside, Martyrs) and introducing genre purists to a new wave of gifted directors. One of the country's best-reviewed offerings was Them (2007), a simple, visceral home invasion thriller helmed by David Moreau and Xavier Palud.

Sadly, they were unable to resist the big studio's flirtations. Even worse, they helped perpetuate Hollywood's maddening trend of pilfering from Japanese horror, post Gore Verbinski's The Ring remake. Moreau and Palud's Asian victim: 2002's The Eye (directed by the Pang brothers, who, coincidentally, you'll find elsewhere in this countdown).

A star vehicle for Jessica Alba, the '08 version of The Eye keeps the same plot—a woman's eye transplant gives her the ability to see ghosts—but loses all of the creepiness, freshness, and visual flair. Unlike Them, The Eye telegraphs all of its jump scares and resorts to wonky special effects whenever it's time to ratchet up some terror.

The duo's next project, 20 ans d'écart, is, per IMDb, a comedy. Fans of scary movies, rejoice!

Director: John Woo
Country of origin: China

Not all foreign directors come to Hollywood and jump the artistic shark, of course. Just look at John Woo's filmography, which includes the dynamite Nicolas Cage/John Travolta potboiler Face/Off (1997) and the box office smash Mission: Impossible 2 (2000). The former capitalized more on Woo's string of China-made action classics, demonstrating the same degrees of panache seen in The Killer (1989) and Hard-Boiled (1992).

But what the hell happened with Paycheck? Similar to Daredevil and Phantoms, Paycheck will perhaps best be remembered as one of the films Ben Affleck will have to keep living down now that he's a respected and award-winning director. Reducing a slick Philip K. Dick short story into an orgy of bedlam, gunfire, and dopey characters, Woo's cinematic dud feels like the work of a hack, not the guy who once made The Killer. Maybe he'd performed Face/Off surgery with Stephen Sommers before production began.

Director: Hideo Nakata
Country of origin: Japan

You can't blame Hideo Nakata for wanting some stateside recognition. After all, his superb supernatural horror film Ringu (1998) provided the basis for Gore Verbinski's massive, genre-revitalizing hit The Ring (2002), though only devoted genre enthusiasts acknowledged the original and its Japanese director. So when the inevitable sequel, The Ring Two, came to fruition, with star Naomi Watts still onboard, Nakata must've considered it a prime opportunity to show American audiences how the O.G. gets down.

Unfortunately, they also hired screenwriter Ehren Kruger, whose script for this putrid enterprise riddles itself with Swiss cheese-like holes when it's not ineffectively rehashing the scariest bits from Verbinski's film. The rest of the film's key players, meanwhile, do nothing to better his hack-job of a screenplay. You get the feeling that Watts, who looks either bored or embarrassed throughout, signed onto this waste of time out of a sense of obligation.

By the film's end, one gets the sense that, for his part, Nakata really just wanted cash an American paycheck. Forget highway robbery—that's international airway theft.

Director: Xavier Gens
Country of origin: France

To be fair, Xavier Gens has merely shown signs of potential eliteness. In his best feature-length work to date, the 2007 French horror hybrid Frontiere(s), Gens displayed a real knack for staging unrelenting, forcible carnage, overtly acknowledging genre influences like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and The Descent with startling moments of lavish bloodshed. That sense of gory macabre returns in the upcoming anthology The ABC's of Death (available on VOD January 31), in which Gens tackles the letter X in the finely tuned, intensely horrific vignette "XXL."

Clearly, dude should stick to horror, because if his 2007 attempt at stylized action cinema, the video game adaptation Hitman, is any indication, Gens has no shot at becoming France's answer to Michael Bay. Starring the good but hindered Timothy Olyphant (Justified), Hitman wastes away for 90 minutes with hammy dialogue, confusingly shot action sequences, and a distracting lack of tension.

Directors: Oxide Pang Chun and Danny Pang
Country of origin: China

The 1999 Chinese action flick Bangkok Dangerous, written and directed by the Pang brothers, is quick, vibrant, witty, and packed with airtight action sequences that'd feel right at home in a Hollywood summer blockbuster. It's the kind of high-octane movie one watches and thinks, "I could see these guys working well in the stateside studio system." But then, such thinkers would be heinously wrong.

Evidence: Their unnecessary, lobotomized 2008 Bangkok Dangerous U.S. remake, starring Nicolas Cage in his laughably inept prime. Sporting one of his now-trademark goofy hairdos, "The Cage" (as we like to call him) defines the term miscasting in this plodding misfire. He plays a hitman trying to remain inconspicuous in Thailand, which, as the movie makes clear, is utterly ridiculous—between that hair and overly theatrical mannerisms, Cage sticks out like Gheorghe Muresan in a kindergarten classroom.

In the history of foreign filmmakers remaking their best movies for Hollywood (a much better example: Michael Haneke's Funny Games, with Naomi Watts), the Pang brothers' second Bangkok Dangerous is the worst one yet.

Director: Eric Valette
Country of origin: France

With his 2002 French-language debut, Malefique, director Eric Valette worked wonders in a confined, mostly single-location setting. The film takes place predominantly inside a tight, uninviting prison cell, where four inmates dig up a dead prisoner's diary and unleash all kinds of paranormal activity upon themselves and the entire jail. It's equal parts Alfred Hitchcock (think the limited space of Lifeboat and Dial M for Murder) and A Nightmare on Elm Street (outlandish visuals used to frightening degrees).

The suits working for Warner Bros. Pictures certainly agreed, hiring Valette to direct the latest entry in Hollywood's then-rampant succession of Asian horror remakes, One Missed Call. The original—made by Japanese genre titan Takashi Miike—is derivative of films like Ringu and The Grudge, sure, but it's still equipped with tons of nightmarish imagery; Valette's One Missed Call, on the other hand, is simply nightmarish.

A catastrophic bomb marked by robotic acting and cliches, it's notable only for the rare feat it achieved on the Rotten Tomatoes: Out of 78 critics' reviews, One Missed Call received zero positive ones, giving it the ever-dreaded, shameful 0% rating. Which puts it in the same league as, gasp, Nick Swardson's Bucky Larson: Born to be a Star. The horror!

Director: Jaume Balagueró
Country of origin: Spain

Jaume Balagueró's Darkness is a textbook example of what-the-fuck cinema—as in, you'll constantly ask yourself, "What the fuck is going on here?" throughout its entire duration.

In 1999, the Spanish filmmaker earned respect at various film festivals with the supernatural chiller The Nameless, which attracted Hollywood types, specifically Academy Award-winning actress Anna Paquin. Three years later, she teamed up with Balagueró on Darkness, a haunted house movie about an American teenager who moves to Spain and inhabits a crib full of terrors.

Well, "terrors" in theory. By the time the already sloppy Darkness premiered in U.S. theaters on Christmas 2004, it'd been cut down and stupidly re-edited, rendering it an incoherent, dizzying mess of Mystery Science Theater 3000 proportions.

Give Balagueró tons of credit, though: He's since bounced back tremendously. He's one-half of the directorial team behind [REC] and [REC]2, two of the found-footage trend's best entries, and last year he quietly delivered a psychological thriller masterwork with Sleep Tight.