Battlefield Earth (2000)

★★½
Early in Battlefield Earth, the hero Jonnie Goodboy Tyler (Barry Pepper) thinks he's come across a monster and swings at it with a weapon he finds nearby. When he has a moment to get his bearings, he sees that it was only a lifeless structure. We recognize it as a dragon or dinosaur statue from a mini golf course, and his weapon was a golf club. Jonnie meets two hunters, who inform him of a great city nearby where the gods were frozen in their place during a conflict long ago. The hunters take Jonnie to the city to show him. They find one frozen god, who is just a stone statue. They go inside a building, where Jonnie sees more frozen gods and observes that they must have really angered someone to bring this horrible fate upon them. They are department store mannequins. This is not supposed to be a comedy, but the movie was trending in that direction. I realized this in the first 10 minutes, but I kept holding out hope that the script would settle down and deliver the serious science fiction action movie that the trailers promised. That never happened; the movie kept defying my expectations. Eventually I just gave in and enjoyed what I was watching because it was making me laugh. I saw this in the theater on its premiere weekend. I couldn't gauge the audience's reaction to this, but I'm certain everyone around me could gauge mine.

Ace Ventura: Pet Detective (1994)

★
The character of Ace Ventura behaves like a feral cat brought indoors for the first time. He runs around the room maniacally and expends a great deal of energy running around but going nowhere. Unlike a rescued feral cat, Ace Ventura remains forever untamed. That is to the movie's detriment. Like most viewers in 1994, I saw Ace Ventura: Pet Detective after having watched Jim Carrey's hilarious performances on In Living Color, where he was spot-on with his impersonations (Pee-wee Herman, Vanilla Ice) and original characters like Fire Marshall Bill. His schtick was perfect for a sketch television show, but his boundless enthusiasm unleashed on the big screen resulted in this vapid mystery movie with little going for it. At the time of this movie's release, I was only vaguely aware of box office totals as a measuring stick for success. After Ace Ventura became a huge hit, and after I saw it for the first time with its box office haul in mind, I realized that quality has nothing to do with how much money a movie makes.

Career Opportunities (1991)

★★
At some point at the end of the '80s, possibly beginning with Uncle Buck, John Hughes began a devastating slide into mediocrity. Maybe by then he had spread himself too thin. He was a prolific screenwriter during that decade, often directing the stories that came straight from his heart while allowing others to direct scripts that were less personal. Even though in the '90s he wrote some good movies like Home Alone and Curly Sue, he nonetheless embarked on a mysterious foray into kiddie fare, and the results included Dennis the Menace and Flubber.

The Air Up There (1994)

★★
The Air Up There could have gone several different ways, and even though the story didn't quite go as I had expected, it still ended up with the Big Game at the End. Sports comedies in the '90s were a lucrative if creatively lacking genre. The formula often involved casting a recognizable actor and putting him in charge of a scrappy and inexperienced team that emerges as the victorious underdog. Emilio Estevez, Rodney Dangerfield, Rick Moranis, Whoopi Goldberg and Halle Berry (I'm counting Race the Sun too) took turns leading their teams to varying levels of success, and Kevin Bacon got his chance to play a coach who assembles a team to play against the intimidating and well-funded foe. These movies grew tiresome as the decade went on, and The Air Up There is no exception, though it does tinker with the mechanics of the outline made familiar by others and delivers a few unexpected detours.