The best or worst movies made by anyone tend to be subjective since it’s easy to think that someone else is going to see one movie as great while another will it see as terrible. But the Coen brothers, who have been known for making some truly strange but compelling movies as well las a few straightforward stories that tend to even things out, have been largely successful in their career since otherwise, it’s likely that we wouldn’t be sitting here talking about them and trying to figure out which of their movies are the least effective. Sometimes that’s the nicest way to say it really since calling any movie horrible is usually a type of judgment that’s reserved for those that are truly bad and don’t appear to try before releasing something to the public that might embarrass even a high school production team. But the Coen’s have been known for producing great movies even if some of their work hasn’t always been considered to be that great. Very few directors ever escape the kind of criticism that will eventually need to be faced, since like it or not, they won’t please everyone. The trick appears to be to just keep pushing forward no matter how many people speak out since otherwise one can get bogged down in the negative comments rather quickly.
Here are the five worse Coen brothers movies.
5. The Ladykillers
For a heist movie, this story tries to be a little too complex since the mix of characters that make up the team of hoodlums trying to rob a casino are so different that trying to make them get along is a little impossible as well as hard to believe. This is one of those rare times when Tom Hanks plays the role of the bad guy, and the rest of the cast kind of has to follow his lead as they have to fool an old woman at the same time that they’re trying to get away with the robbery, which is enough to make a person think that this movie would be hilarious, but somehow the dialogue and the overblown plot kind of ruin that.
4. Intolerable Cruelty
Normally a George Clooney movie is something that everyone can agree is a lot of fun, but this one just falls flat from the start since it’s about a gold digger, played by Catherine Zeta-Jones, who’s trying to get everything she can from her current husband and the story kind of just loses all efficiency the moment it gets going. Every actor in this movie is great when they have a plot and a believable amount of dialogue to go on, but in this movie, they’re not really given those tools to work with, since it ends up feeling as though the movie could have done without several characters and been just fine.
3. Hail, Caesar!
If you walk into this movie and it’s already started it feels certain that you’re bound to get confused, especially since there’s so much going on. Some people might think that it’s an okay movie that was given a bad reputation for one reason or another, but there’s a reason why some people would rather forget it. Sometimes more stars in a movie doesn’t really make it that much better since it’s hard to focus on a few stars when several are present. But this is one thing that the Coen’s have done in a number of their movies, and for the most part, it’s worked when they’ve needed it to, so it’s hard to argue with.
2. Burn After Reading
If you made it through more than fifteen minutes of this movie then good for you since the goofy acting by Brad Pitt kind of soured this for some people, while the strange but easy to follow plot made it that way for others. For some reason, it felt like it took forever for the plot to develop, and for everyone to finally get to where they wanted to be. By that time a lot of people were kind of done with the movie and decided to turn it off, or completed it and wondered why they spent the money.
1. True Grit
A lot of John Wayne fans were likely kind of split on this since trying to think that the Duke would approve of this remake is a hard proposition on its own. But while it wasn’t such a bad movie, it did get several Oscar nominations, after all, it still wasn’t quite at the same level that people wanted it to be. That could have been why it didn’t win, but there could have been other reasons as well since there were plenty of criticisms about this movie. All in all, it was kind of hard to get into but not too hard to enjoy for what it was.
So far the Coen’s haven’t made a truly horrible movie.
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