The 10 Most Heavy-Handed Message Movies

Image via Complex Original

At a glance, this is the film everybody in America wanted (well, everyone aside from the Kardashians, that is). Unfortunately, Bobcat Goldthwait doesn't quite have the writing or directing chops to pull of the film's amazing premise.

What you want to see is a darkly realistic take on how reality television has poisoned our culture and seeped stupidity into our nation's minds, and what could really happen (what we're truly scared might happen) if someone snapped under the very real rage they felt about the disintegration of our values.

Instead, what Goldthwait gives us is a half-contemplated, sloppy satire that follows middle-aged Frank (Joel Murray) as he gets diagnosed with a deadly brain tumor and decides to use his last days to mow down reality stars, with the help of teenage sidekick Roxy, who shares his reality-star-rage. 

The unlikely pair then take aim at Hollywood culture, firing off on American Idol and My Super Sweet 16 stars with unmitigated joy, but all the while they seem more preoccupied with firing off witty one-liners than delving into just what drives their bloodshed. In the words of Roxy, "You know what else rips [our] cock off?" When someone attempts satire, and becomes so preoccupied with telling us how vapid something is they don't realize that they've descended into the same meaningless abyss themselves.

Before you get on us about how Remember The Titans is a great movie (one of your favorites actually) give us a second to make our point. We're not saying it wasn't a quality feel-good movie with a positive message, we're just saying they approached that message with the subtlety of a construction worker bulldozing a building. That is to say, with none at all.

Remember the Titans serves up a solid sports story laced with inspiration in a silver chalice, and that sentimental booze is strong. Yes, the script is based on the true story of the 1971 integration of a Virginia High School football team, but director Boaz Yakin takes liberties with the source material and inundates it with every genre cliché we've come to expect from racial inequality movies, and at few points strays from those stringent guidelines.

There are the two coaches who don't get along (a friction that turns friendly in a matter of games), the star player that gets into an accident right before the big game, miraculously allowing the guy who's been warming the bench all season a shot...and do you think he squanders that shot? Would we be talking about this movie if he did?

Our point is, they paint the complicated process of integration as easily achieved, which doesn't give the real-life story of struggle any credit. We can't say why this happened, whether it was lazy filmmaking from Yakin or because Jerry Bruckheimer produced it, but if it were that simple Rodney King would've solved all our problems when he asked, "Can we all get along?"

On the surface, the misunderstanding that drives this movie—a woman forced out of her home due to a minor tax error—seems remarkably commonplace. Why then, does this movie end in such overwrought melodrama?

We'll tell you why: The mundane source of conflict is a device to take you off guard. We're forced to sit through over 126 minutes of Jennifer Connelly's moping and Ben Kingsley's Middle Eastern accent as they squabble over real estate, all the while not understanding where it's all going. It drums up sympathy for the Middle Eastern family, showing Kingsley working a slew of thankless jobs, and manages to make us question authority thanks to a meddling cop who beds Connelly and takes it upon himself to insert himself in the drama.

The heartbreaking conclusion comes out of left field and leaves us with an unshakable feeling that every minute of the longest two hours of our life was merely an elaborate, shameless attempt at manipulating our emotions and leading us to this very moment. There are effective ways to demonstrate that family is important and possessions are not, but this sadly contrived plot was not one of them.

Sure, Wall-E is completely freaking adorable. But somehow, through a few electronic beeps and synthesized robot sounds, robot Wall-E manages to condescendingly communicate the movie's ham-fisted message: You are disgustingly lazy, overly-reliant on technology, and, oh yeah, a completely disrespectful slob when it comes to the environment.

Wall-E smothers us with guilt as he slaves day and night to clean up our mess, which has made Earth uninhabitable and forced humans into outer space, where they are doomed to spend their days on mobilized couches, so captivated by the computer-like hologram around them that they barely realize their surroundings.

At one point, a bloated human rolls off his couch, portrayed as a pathetic beached whale who needs a service bot to get him back on his chair, presumably because he's too dumb and fat to do so himself. When another hefty human's hologram is disconnected, she seems in awe of the world around her, saying: "I didn't know we had a pool."

We loved Wall-E, don't get us wrong, but they could have went a little less preachy with the, "Get off your computer, you pathetic, cellulite-ridden mess."  And no, we're not just saying that because Wall-E offended us with its accuracy. OK...yes we are.

We wanted to like Crash, we really did, but then we realized it was only an entertaining charade at best, its characters merely plot devices with heads attached.

When Sandra Bullock rattles off her "I'm scared, he's black" speech, in the opening scenes of the movie, we're immediately alerted to the fact that we're about to be taught a lesson about racism. What we're not told is that it will be so transparently delivered that it would actually render the message ineffective.

Every scenario plays out a display of textbook bigotry, and the plot is organized in a way that takes pains to intersect each scene, layering an outrageous monologue where Ludacris declares hip-hop "the music of the oppressor" (a ridiculous statement clearly written by a very white person) on top of a series of dramatic coincidences, like a racist police officer who sexually violates a woman during a pat-down and later saves her life. The result is a pile-up of clichés that tidily demonstrate's racism's two-fold terrors, as each storyline reveals its contrived twist.

How Crash's muddled moral message managed to finagle an Oscar trophy for Best Picture for its blatant assault of our intelligence still baffles us to this day. 

Babel is much like Crash with its use of intersecting storylines, but plays out its premise on a more widespread, global scale.

Babel begins with a child's mistake, an accidental shooting that thrusts Cate Blanchett's character into critical condition in a foreign country, unable to get the help she needs. The action is fueled by a series of similarly trivial incidents, all brought on by some form of miscommunication that results in grave circumstances outside of the character's control.

Each story, while effective, unfolds by means of conceit, alerting us all the while of the writers looming over each plot twist, meddling with our emotions just to illuminate the film's heavy-handed biblical reference. In the end, we're left with a highly implausible, stammering story about the perils of language and a dark lesson about what happens when different cultures fail to understand one another.

Unsurprisingly, this symbolism-soaked script managed to snag an Oscar nomination for Best Picture, undoubtedly prompting unforeseen numbers of future filmmakers to produce similarly contrived creations. Sigh.

Before you torch your computer in a fit of rage, realize that we, like you, very much enjoyed this movie. We truly found it thought-provoking, but now that we've wiped the salty tears out of our eyes, we see we had no choice but to find it that way.

The hard-hitting message of racism's inherent evil is massaged in at every turn, and even Edward Norton's compelling portrayal of neo-nazi Derek can't distract from the continual contrivances used to drive the weight of his life-changing transformation from ardent racist to equality advocate home.

The film sets us up for the punch line with a non-linear narrative that uses a "class" as the framework to teach us a lesson, and punctuates it with black-and-white flashbacks (c'mon now!) that obviously allude to Derek's formerly flawed way of looking at the world. When we're in color (he's seen the light!), Derek's bigoted attitude is tidily solved after three years in prison (is that all a curb-stomp gets you?) after a black inmate is friendly in the laundry room (and, when his own white supremacist "brothers" rape him when he calls them out for being more drug dealers, less white warriors). Cue too-easily-achieved ah-ha moment! 

American X may confront uneasy truths, but it arrives at its brutal end via manipulated, often hackneyed means, making the lesson it carries a forced take-away, rather than the deftly told cautionary tale it could have been, had it trusted us to draw conclusions on our own.

If we can give Pay It Forward props for anything, it's that the title clearly illustrates what you're getting yourself into: A saccharine-soaked storyline unapologetically laced with a morality lesson.

We all know we could be kinder, more selfless human beings, and thanks to Trevor (Haley Joel Osmont) we know how. We only need to do something nice for three people, and those three people will then do three nice things for other people and trigger a widespread disease known as altruism. We'd elaborate, but we can't because we just vomited in our mouths a little bit.

It's not that we're cynical (we are) or that we know this simplistic plan would never work in real life (it wouldn't), we just resent that after we're force-fed this optimistic philosophy (Osmont literally draws the whole plan for us on the blackboard) and forced to wade through wholesome sentiment before we're accosted by a surprisingly horrific conclusion that shows the idea's collapse. Which goes to prove our point, that blind kindness is dumb, and should be reserved for people who deserve it, not indiscriminately parceled out to strangers.

A young, naked virgin bathing in supple red rose petals? This sledgehammer subtle metaphor is just one of many devices True Blood creator Alan Ball's script uses to  drive this bleak, suburban satire into our skull.

OK, we'll admit it. This was one of our favorite movies way back when, but it's only now that we see why we found it so affecting. Lester Burnham's (Kevin Spacey) voice was hovering over us throughout the entire movie, his voice-over pointing out symbolism (which we would have liked to discern for ourselves) at every turn. That bag being blown around by the wind? That's happiness; see how fragile it is, how dependent on outside forces? See my wife there? She's the embodiment of everything that's wrong with America, with you. She cares more about our couch than me. See the cascade of roses, and splashes of red scattered in each scene? That's red like red-blooded, like lust, like youth, like...

Well, we don't want to spoil the ending, but the final flourish of red confirms what we knew all along. Lester, along with director Sam Mendes, was shamelessly manipulating our pliable heartstrings! Shame on them. 

Even if we overlook the now widely-agreed upon fact that Avatar is a blatant rip-off of Pocahontas and Dances with Wolves, we refuse to give director James Cameron a pass on the movie's not-so-subtly-disguised finger wagging. 

Cameron barely manages to disguise his contempt for American imperialism and all past/presently existing racism, painting the "other" as Smurf blue Na'vi race who are a peaceful, new age people who have respect for the environment. And us? We're those milky white, gun-wielding terrorists, invading a peaceful, self-sustaining environment, taking lives and destroying nature for our commercial gain. 

Wait, what? We'd never do that! We have respect for the environment, and other cultures, except for that time we practically wiped out Native Americans so we could usurp their territory, and the countless times we've spilled oil in the ocean, and invaded countries whose beliefs weren't like our own. Ah, nevermind, we see what you're getting at, Cameron. And for the record, we didn't need the 3-D to see your point.