8) Gangster Squad
Despite all it had going for it, there was hardly anything fun about Ruben Fleischer’s Gangster Squad. Whether it was Dion Beebe’s ghastly cinematography, which lacquered everything in a cartoonish sheen, Sean Penn’s OTT villainy, or the flatness of the cinematic reunion between Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone, so much about this film stank of failure. When crazy uncle Nick Nolte comes out of a film with more dignity than anyone, you know you’re on to a loser.
And yet, there very nearly was at least one saving grace for Gangster Squad: the film’s Tommy Gun-blazing movie theater shoot-out, advertised in the trailers as its key action sequence.
However, the scene was pulled following the real-life Aurora cinema shooting, and reshoots replaced the sequence with another more generic set-piece set in Chinatown. The filmmakers can’t be blamed for removing a scene that could have potentially offended; they can, however, be blamed for replacing it with something as dull as what we eventually got.