In honor (or dishonor) of Max Payne's languid PG-13 rating, Joel Massie investigates the best of the worst in films that seriously needed more sex, drugs, violence, nudity, and chainsaw dismemberments.
10. The One
Rated PG-13 for wussified martial arts violence.
Objects in screenshot may be cooler than actual movie.
The majority of Jet Li’s early American movies have been Rated R for intense martial arts violence – except this One. Maybe Jet Li should stay out of alternate dimensions and realities, but if he has to have an evil twin roaming parallel worlds, there should be a lot more ass-kicking going on. I’d expect this watered down stuff from Chan, but not Li. I’ll just pretend Mummy 3 doesn’t exist.
9. Mr. and Mrs. Smith
Rated PG-13 for not enough violence, action, sexual content and strong language.
Maybe someone will remake Eyes Wide Shut
Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie as married assassins fighting against each other. Who wouldn’t want to see more violence and nudity in this film?.
8. Will Ferrell’s Sports Comedies: Talladega Nights, Blades of Glory, Kicking and Screaming
Rated PG-13 for general lack of humor.
I really have no idea how they could have made these movies Rated R.
While these Will Ferrell vehicles had a meager spattering of laughs, they never reached the comedic brilliance of Wedding Crashers or Old School. The fix? Crank the humor into R-rated territory and their success would likely have been much better. Come to think of it, Stranger than Fiction wasn’t very good either.
7. Aeon Flux
Rated PG-13 for sequences of non-Charlize Theron sexual content.
Didn't you win some kind of award for something?
Perhaps nothing could have made this film better, but amping up the violence, sexuality, and bloodletting would have been a start. The original cartoon was more graphic than this cheesy blunder.
6. The Happening
Rated PG-13 for big egos and terrible twist endings.
If only they were running from something scary.
M. Night Shyamalan should really make an R Rated horror film. He’s obviously exhausted his supply of psychological thrills, so he should turn to some good old fashioned blood and guts for scares. What’s that you say? This WAS Rated R? Impossible. How could it be R Rated and be devoid of anything even remotely scary?
5. Jersey Girl
Rated PG-13 because Kevin Smith forgot what he was good at.
Which is funnier: being a single parent or cracking crude jokes outside
a convenience store?
Okay, Jersey Girl wasn’t half bad, but a Kevin Smith movie not rated R? Isn’t that like bread without butter or fish without chips? I miss Jay and Silent Bob.
4. All the American Horror Movie Remakes (The Fog, Prom Night, When a Stranger Calls, The Invasion, etc.)
Rated PG-13 for not being as good as the original.
Only slightly titillating.
Nothing screams failure like remaking a horror movie and it turning out to be less scary than the original. Could this have been avoided by being Rated R? Maybe not, but it couldn’t have hurt. To make matters worse, quite a few of the originals were Rated R.
3. All the Asian Horror Remakes (The Grudge, The Eye, Pulse, Shutter, One Missed Call, etc.)
Rated PG-13 for not having the balls to show some gore.
When your poster is scarier than your movie, something needs to be changed.
After The Ring, an epidemic of Asian horror remakes swamped the theaters, none of which could fully capture the creepy terror of Verbinski’s original…uh, remake. And of course since The Ring secured a PG-13 rating, every copycat also had to keep the gore and violence to a minimum, hoping atmosphere would outweigh the lack of onscreen bloodletting. It didn’t.
2. Aliens Vs. Predator
Rated PG-13 for slime. (this isn't a joke. look it up.)
Screenshot from either AVP or Bambi 3: Caught in the Headlights
Take some slimy monsters that kill by tearing themselves out of people’s chests and shredding faces with two sets of teeth and pit them against crazed beasts that hunt humans for sport and rip their spinal cords out of their bodies before skinning them. Then try to make that a PG-13 movie. It’s actually quite miraculous that Paul W. S. Anderson managed to screw up the franchise as bad as he did with his blood-free, curse-free, diet-AVP.
1. Live Free or Die Hard
Rated PG-13 for kicking ass and taking names and catch phrases away.
"Watch out kid. Right around this corner is a rapidly dying career."
Yippee-ki-yay…uh, sucker. In Die Hard, John McClane was all about spouting obscenities, crawling through broken glass barefoot, and seriously messing people up. Die Hard 2 found him shoving icicles in people’s eyes and blowing up airplanes, and Die Hard 3 paired him with the hilariously foul-mouthed Samuel L. Jackson for even more violence and fun. So what happens in Die Hard 4? McClane plays nursemaid to a geeky computer nerd and meets Kevin Smith in a basement. At least he got to beat up a girl.
- Joel Massie
.
More Recent News Articles:
F'ing hilarious article. There should be some Schwarzennegger movies on here, unless they were all rated R. Come to think of it, they probably all were.