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| 10. Kick-Ass Clever, dark, funny and not what you think if you haven't read the comic. |
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| 9. The Crow Falls in line with 300 and some others where the only review you can really give is "it's so cool!" |
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| 8. Spider-Man 2 Usually I go with the first film in a series as being the best because I think the degree of difficulty is higher, but that doesn't really apply to comic book movies because of the source material. This movie does a great job of showing that being Spider-Man is hard on Peter while still keeping the movie fun and fast paced. |
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| 7. Superman II There are really only two different types of story lines that work with Superman in a movie. One is to have him question how much he should do (let's be honest, he could be a God if he wanted to, it is up to him to decide what he should be), that was the crux of the first Superman. The other is to have him deal with actual danger, a threat not just to the world but to him (that is fun with Superman because it almost never happens, it is him trying to save Lois or the world but never really being in any personal danger). That is what Superman II is all about and it makes for a really fun movie. |
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| 6. Iron Man Marvel Studios showed the world that they "got it" with the original Iron Man. They looked through their roster, found a character that wasn't mainstream in the way Spider-Man or The Hulk were, but that you could see would translate perfectly to the movies and made his story. The success of this movie is what begat all of the Marvel stuff to follow (Iron Man 2, Thor, Captain America and The Avengers). After some very high profile failures this was definitely a home run. |
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| 5. The Dark Knight I know, this is #1 on most of these lists, and there are a lot of reasons why. It is in many ways to superhero comic book movies what The Dark Knight Returns and Watchmen were to comics in the 80's, proof positive that a superhero story can be something deeper, darker and more adult (in the non pornographic sense) than we had previously given them credit for. Still, as much as I love this movie, I miss the merriment and surreal nature of comics that Christopher Nolan stripped away to make something based more firmly in "reality". Its undeniably brilliant, but where was the fun? |
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| 4. The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across The 8th Dimension To me this kind of list wouldn't be true if it didn't have some overtly personal favorites - this is mine. I quoted this movie all through college when it first came out and I still watch it at least three times a year. because, remember people, "no matter where you go, there you are." |
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| 3. 300 When I wrote a top 50 comic book movie thing for IMDB I noted that this was the first salvo in the great war, Alan Moore versus Frank Miller (if you don't know what that means go find your resident family geek and they will explain it to you). Alan Moore ended up having four movies on my top 50 (Watchmen, V for Vendetta, Constantine and From Hell) while Miller was a little trickier to tabulate (do you count Tim Burton's Batman as a Miller adaptation?). In the end the matter could not be resolved by looking merely at their movie adaptations. As for this movie, like I said about The Crow, It's So Cool! |
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| 2. A History of Violence Tense, taut and brilliant. The book was good, the movie is even better |
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| 1. Batman Unlike most of today's comic book adaptations Tim Burton's first foray into the world of Batman is a true adaptation of (predominantly Frank Miller's) comic. It takes all the grit and realism that was in The Dark Knight Returns AND keeps surreal quirkiness to let you know this isn't your world. For all the genius of Nolan and the Marvel adaptations maybe their only flaw is that these things couldn't happen in our reality, so stop trying so hard to make us feel like it is. |
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