It takes a lot of time, effort and people to make a bad movie.  Last night I watched one of them.  I won’t say which in case one day I end up working for someone involved.  It was based on a book, which is surprising because you’d think there would be very little chance of messing it up.  To be fair, I didn’t watch the entire thing, but we gave it a good half-hour before putting it out of its misery.

The script wasn’t the only thing wrong with it, but it was its biggest problem. 

Passive Hero.  The hero went around asking questions all the time instead of taking action.  Whenever he did take action, it wasn’t of his own volition, he was often told what to do or how to act and had little if no control over his actions.

Contrived Circumstances.  The hero has happily gone through life until now without any problems but suddenly he’s surrounded by people just like him (with superpowers) and lots of bad guys suddenly want to kill him. 

Love Interest.  Seemed more like she was placed there because they needed a love interest.  There was very little love and no interest in it on my part.

Low Stakes.  Okay, so his mom’s life was on the line, but so what?  We didn’t get to know him and his life well enough before all this weird stuff happened to be able to empathize with his plight.

Unrealistic.  I can buy that there’s a few people like him around with these special powers, but it seemed like there was a whole army of them in training.  Our hero’s training was nothing more than being thrown into battle so why have a training centre at all? 

Inconsistent Rules.  The bad guys could get into the training grounds where only people like him were supposed to be allowed.  Until now he was protected from harm by friends and relatives, but inexplicably, this barrier was breached and now he’s got to run for his life.

Weak Characters.  Aside from a passive hero, the other characters were weak.  They were cardboard cut-outs of other characters we’d seen on screen before.  They were merely there to serve one purpose – deliver exposition. 

The really unfortunate thing was I had been working on a similar concept and now that this was a box-office flop, there’s no way mine will get made.  Oh well, good thing I didn’t get to far into development and I’ve got other ideas on the go.