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Films To Stop Watching Half-Way Through

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We chuckled our way through Alexander Payne’s Downsizing yesterday. Well, to be exact, we chuckled our way through the first half. Taking a bonkers premise – Norwegian scientist invents a process for shrinking people to four inches high – the first half is a riot. Endorsed by governments as a solution to overpopulation and resource depletion, downsizing is a pretty sharp hour of gags following this premise. Sort of ‘Honey I Shrunk The Kids but think of the Lifestyle’ it plays well on the idea that if by being downsized with our current purchasing power, we can afford all the material possessions and lifestyle ‘Big Life’ denies us, then lots of people would. So you can have a Mcmansion, live in a fabulous gated community, drink champagne and never work again. But then, half-way through, it pivots in the space of fifteen minutes into a super-serious end-of-the-world ecoplyse now. Out go almost all the gags, in come scientists now saying ‘We’ve done the modelling and the outcome is extinction for humanity’. This second half works less well, let’s say.

So, when exactly should you stop watching a particular film?

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Comments

  1. In the case of WALL-E as soon as they get into the spaceship, in the case of Full Metal Jacket as soon as they go to Vietnam. Nothing quite so bad about their second halves, but in both cases a let-down after a superlative first.

  3. I tried watching Boiling Point yesterday because I am a big fan of Stephen Green but to be honest after 5 minutes I knew I wasn’t going to get it.
    I gave it another half an hour which was really painful.

  4. I don’t recall ever giving up on a film half-way through. I tend to push on regardless to the end. Of course there are dire films where you just know there is no hope of redemption or improvement. But I still watch to the end for completion’s sake. Similarly, I don’t understand folks who leave early at football matches. Even if the game’s been dire there can be incredible excitement in the last five minutes. There’s great pleasure to be had in knowing you’ve stuck around for it, and only when you’ve seen the whole thing can you give a full and honest appraisal.

      • Quite right. I can’t imagine thinking that I had less right to sack off an experience I’m hating just because I’d be disqualified from writing the review in Empire (which, let’s face it, is always 4 stars anyway).

        And like Nick Hornby writes in 31 Songs, in praise of walking out, “let me tell you, there’s nothing like the taste of pasta and a glass of wine at nine-thirty if you thought you weren’t going to be eating until eleven.”

    • I agree about the stupidity of leaving football matches early. I remember a game between Birmingham city and Man City in the championship. The game was as dull as dishwater until the 89th minute and not a shot on goal by either team. Man City took the lead in the 89th minute. Birmingham equalised in the 93rd minute and scored the winner in the 97th minute. Wouldn’t have missed it for the world.

        • I used to work in an office with a couple of guys who were season tickets holders down the blues when I’d just started work in the late 80s. At a night match one of them managed to yawn so hard he dislocated his jaw and fainted with the pain. They had to get the St Johns ambulance people in to stretcher him out of the crowd

          That may well have been the most exciting thing to happen at St Andrews in that decade

      • I go watching a League 1 team regularly, and there’s a bloke who sits near us who has inverted the ‘beat the traffic’ stereotype. He turns up late – as in around the 40-minute mark – of every game. It’s not restricted to 3pm kick-offs, as he does the same at evening and lunchtime matches. Why???

    • I’m trusting a 40 year old memory here so this might be completely wrong but this in why I never leave a sporting contest early.

      In the TV version of The Odd Couple sportswriter Oscar left a volleyball game before it finished and submitted his story which had no reference to the games conclusion which came about when a spectator pulled a gun and shot the referee.

      and not as dramatic but this is actually true a couple of sportswriters in Australia left the Brisbane Test of the 60/61 season early as it was, they thought, petering out into a draw. They submitted their stories and caught an early flight home. When they got there they discovered the Test ended in a tie, the first in history.

  7. I think Psycho loses it’s way a bit in the second half. The part up to the first “major incident” is peerless, magnificent, the second half with isolated exceptions tends to be of lower quality in my opinion.

  8. Stargate sort of does it for you – they ran out of budget half-way through making it and had to wind up the story quick. It took a TV series, three years later, to conclude the narrative arc.

  9. I find that with so many films now thinking it’s normal to be 120/50++ minutes long it’s more a case of which films do you fall asleep to half-way through. The key question is then whether or not to watch the rest of it tomorrow. Not often tbh. But recently I watched Spielberg’s 1941 over three nights and realised at the end I should never have started. Been wanting to see it for years but it was sh*te.

  10. I nearly sacked off the new Matrix film halfway through, but that doesn’t meet the terms of the OP. Because the correct time to stop watching The Matrix Resurrections is before the release of The Matrix Reloaded and The Matrix Revolutions.

    • To elaborate, not that you asked:

      It is actually one of the worst films I’ve seen in quite a long time. (It’s not Zack Snyder-DC bad: it’s a whole different species of bad. I don’t think anyone thought Man of Steel or Justice League were in the running to be *good*.)

      But Matrix 4 is definitely the worst “film-which-thinks-it’s-a-good-film” film I’ve seen in a couple of decades. It’s also a perfect example of what happens when a very dumb filmmaker thinks they’re being genuinely clever and interesting.

      (Full disclosure: I heartily enjoyed the first 30 mins but only because I was laughing so hard at all the pseudo-profundity and on-the-nose callbacks which Lana Wachowski clearly thinks are very subtle references. The film intercuts clips of all the unavailable original actors into shots of the person who’s now playing that character, just in case you’ve had a catastrophic and sudden neurological event and don’t know what room you’re in. There’s an actual black cat named Deja Vu. It’s hilarious.)

      • Haha – I actually do quite like MoS. Far too long, and meat-headedly Snyderish in places, but it also made contact in its early stages with the Superman movie I always wanted; Costner as Jonathan Kent, teaching his boy to pass as human, and to accept the flawed humanity of others. Sigh.

        Justice League is, of course, a war crime.

        • It’s Zod’s Papa Roach goatee I can’t forgive. (Plus the fact that they made him a SIR YES SIR general straight out of a Michael Bay movie. Plus the “we’re very modern now” costumes. Plus the yawnathon action. Plus SUPERMAN KILLS A GUY wut.)

  11. I would recommend ceasing watching the latest Matrix movie immediately prior to the point at which your eyes first begin bleeding. Either that or right before the cinema attendants barricade the doors closed and retreat to their bunker.

    Oh, and I always stop watching Cloud Atlas as soon as I’ve seen the bits with a post-apocalyptic cannibal Hugh Grant. Unimprovable.

      • My wife walked out of the second one to go to the lav when the old guy surrounded by tellies was making loads of exposition that she couldn’t get. And when she came back it had finished and I was sat there on my own in the cinema

        • That old guy with the tellies is Matrix distilled: talking utter shit but in multisyllabic words. The absolute definition of a stupid person’s idea of a clever person, as if someone got Stephen Fry to go through a 4Chan conspiracy post with a thesaurus and change every third word to “indubitably”.

  12. I think the whole Omaha beach sequence of Saving Private Ryan is amazing. Horrific but amazing. But I think you might as well stop watching it after that and put on The Thin Red Line instead.

  13. The only film I left halfway through was Sex and the City 2. I was one of only 2 males in the cinema and when Sean (the other guy) was told the long film still had another hour to run, he suggested a pint. At this point Carrie’s friends were screaming at a pair of shoes or something, so I readily agreed.

    • If the universally scathing reviews are anything to go by SATC2 is the sort of film it’s best to stop watching halfway through your bus or car ride to the cinema

    • Despite being set in Abu Dhabi, they weren’t allowed to film there. And it wasn’t shown in the UAE either (they reckoned they could have cut it to make it showable but it wouldn’t have lasted long enough for it be good value for money for local cinema goers )

    • The film I’ve slept through most. My eldest started very young with this one and was her favourite film for many a year. But never once have I seen it all (or will). Stra ngest time was when I woke up to someone saying ‘I’ll never let you go’ and then she did. I questioned this and was told to go back to sleep because I didn’t understand. I was happy to oblidge.

  15. The Lighthouse seemed to have promise to begin with. It was intriguing and you wondered where it would lead. I think heading into ever increasing derangement and violence showed a lack of inspiration and the whole thing became tiresome and really bad.

  16. With so many films available so easily these days, we’ve become a lot choosier with what we tolerate. One Saturday evening we started and didn’t finish two films. I guess the answer to the question ‘when do you bail?’ is that it’s normally the second time we’ve looked at each other quizzically!
    As far as Downsizing is concerned, I watched that on a plane a few years ago and rather enjoyed it having known nothing about it previously. …. it’s entirely possible that I fell asleep a couple of times and rewound it!

  17. Vanilla Sky is certainly a movie that shifts its narrative and mood radically around the midway point. At the outset, the settings and – as you’d expect with Cameron Crowe – the music, are engaging enough. By the end, you may well wish you had only watched the first half. However, I’m sure I’m not alone in watching it again, to try and figure out where Cameron Crowe screwed it up. Fundamentally, whatever convoluted plot he’s trying to put across, that shift in mood halfway just doesn’t work.

  18. Frankenstein movies: it is a universal law in our household that. there is a perfectly good Liam movie to be made from the second half of Taken 1 (missing out the excruciating family life background and getting straight to Limping Liam Vengeance) and the first half of Taken 2. Nothing redeemable in Taken 3.

  19. I used to stick rubbish films out to the bitter end, but life is too short. Occasionally I get it wrong though. The first time I watched La La Land I turned it off after the first number, deciding it wasn’t for me. But I rewatched it last year and now think it’s fantastic. Being recently divorced from the love of my life made the ending get to me a bit, but I was so wrong about it, and I’m not really a musicals fan.

    • I lasted about quarter if an hour because the couple so annoying. Do they become likeable or, as I suspected at the time, are you meant to warm to them as they are at the start of the film?

      • As it has recently won awards, that was my first choice of film on a plane once. I think I managed 20 minutes when I asked my wife (who’d seen it at the cinema) if it was like that all the way through. I didn’t get any further.

  21. All cinema walk-outs for me.

    Hot Tub Time Machine sounded like a great idea and had a few decent reviews but just wasn’t funny at all so we left about a third of the way. Didn’t get to the end of Planet Terror as it was too gooey for me. And Man Bites Dog, I saw on release but not all of it. There’s a point where I couldn’t watch beyond.

    • “Hot Tub Time Machine sounded like a great idea…”. Well I can only understand this if someone told you it was like “Cocoon without Steve Gutenberg”, and you were overly impressed with the “without Steve Gutenberg” bit. Admittedly it’s a plus, but it isn’t everything.

      Mind you, he was excellent in Twin Peaks.

  22. This will make you laugh (or cry) but we went to see a film by Aleksandr Sokurov at a film festival which was so mind boggling boring that we walked out (we enjoyed The Russian Ark btw so it wasn’t that). And then it was on at another film festival and because we’d sort of forgotten or couldn’t remember anything about it we went to see it again by mistake. And walked out again when we realised about half way through the tedium that we had seen it. And even now I still can’t remember what it’s called.

  23. I’ve also seen plenty of cut films (and even a re-ordered Pulp Fiction) back in the late 90s in Dubai so I’ve missed some large chunks of films. Mostly things I’d never bother to go and see in their full form as well

      • IIRC, Terry G had a huge battle with the studio over the ending that did him no good in his later career. I remember the ending as pulling off the well nigh impossible feat of being simultaneously upbeat and downbeat. Up there with 12 Monkeys as my fave of his films-

        • Yeahbut, not much competition – the only other good one is The Fisher King. All the others I’ve seen were shite and the ones I’ve not seen look like they’ll be shite, according to my various prejudices, so I’ll not be seeing them thank you very much.

          • They’re objectively not wonderful, but I will nonetheless track down and kill for sport anyone who bad mouths Time Bandits or Baron Munchausen. The latter in particular; I saw it age 9 with my precocious friend Oliver, who passed the time as we queued to get in by loudly explaining Munchausen Syndrome-by-proxy to us all as his poor, despairing mother rolled her eyes and made a mental note to book another appointment with the child psychologist.

    • Believe it or not, when me and my mates went to watch it at the cinema it did end around that point, as the projector broke! The manager gave us all a pass to either come back and watch it again, or come and watch something else. Another mate had watched it the night before us, so we just asked him how it ended and didn’t go back to watch it again. His explanation was actually rubbish, so it wasn’t until I eventually saw it on video that I understood what he was on about.

      We used the pass the week after…and the lass at the door didn’t take them off us. So we used them again the week after. We managed to see 3 or 4 films with it until we turned up and the manager was in the foyer. The game was up!

  25. I often watch ten minutes of a film on Netflix and move on. I’m attracted by an intriguing premise but you know within a few minutes if the idea is better than the execution, which it nearly always is. I made an exception last night and forced myself to watch The Bubble all the way through, as punishment for having been stupid enough to start it.

    It’s possible that it’s an incredibly clever meta joke – a film about making a film that’s full of cliche, tick-box casting and bolted-on action sequences, while being all of those things itself. Or maybe its just really, really bad. Either way I couldn’t stop watching.

    There was something uniquely satisfying about watching normally reliable actors like David Duchovny and Peter Serafinowicz playing actors who know they’re making a dud, while actually doing exactly that. They inhabit their character in every grimace and tic. No acting required. It’s fascinating.

  26. Robert Altman’s Gosford Park is great up to the point where there’s a murder, then it turns to shit rapidly. It feels like two different films. The first part is an inside view of how a country house really would have operated. The second is like a parody of an Agatha Christie murder mystery and is very bad indeed.

  27. The Jordan Peele film “Us”

    I thought it genuinely spooky until they basically stopped the film and explained everything that was happening. From that point the mystery was gone and so was my interest.

    My advice is watch it until the dopplegangers sit down for a chat with the main characters, which is roughly halfway through.

  28. Anything that features deep bass rumbling explosions as soon as the action starts., that tend to last all the way through the second act and climax the third act

    Therefore all of the recent CGI driven stuff of the last 20 years. All the frantic cutting, shouting and cookie cutter bollocks of it all.

    Fuck off Marvel.

    • You’d be surprised how many films are full of CGI. It’s not just the Marvel films. Just look at this. Granted, I guessed some trickery was involved with the lion, but not as much as there was with the rest.

  29. A mate of mine went to see what he thought was Michael Mann’s Heat at the local arthouse cinema. Turned out it was the Andy Warhol produced Heat from 1972. He did manage to tough it out until the end though.

  30. I have misunderstood the OP – I was talking about actually leaving the cinema early. I have lost interest, and walked away from, lots of films when shown at home. The last one was West Side Story. I found I didn’t care about the characters at all and the comedy scenes weren’t very funny.

    Another key reason for losing interest is TV ads. You tend to get the first half hour uninterrupted and then 15 minutes and then every 5 minutes – very tedious. These are likely to be of the childrens Saturday evening oeuvre though, rather than Eraserhead.

  31. Two films I walked out of – Christiane F, the Berlin junkie film with the Bowie soundtrack, because I was a teenager, and the subject matter alarmed me
    – Wonderland by Michael Winterbottom, because it was really boring.

    • A friend of ours is notorious for squemishness at the cinema. Why she agreed to go and see Re-animator when it came out no-one will ever know. Ten minutes in and the thud of the seat-back signalled an early departure.

  32. Logan’s Run: the first half setting up the dystopian story world is silly but alright, but it just gets stoopid when they run away to the outside world and meet Peter Ustinov and the fish-fillet robot.

    • I was just thinking that. I used to take Twang Jr to the Saturday morning flicks and have a nice nap.

      Another time I did quite deliberately have a snooze in “Dead Man” where Johnny Depp got shot in the first 5 minutes and spent 2 hours swaying about on a horse. I nodded off after an hour, occasionally opened one eye and he was still swaying about on the horse, and I think I managed to keep my eyes open for him to finally fall off and carck it. Phew.

  34. True story. My first post divorce date. Blade Runner sequel. Cos its got good reviews and seemed safe ground (for me). She seems less excited but shows willing. I’ve drunk a sneaky few on the way (first date in 20 years, nerves). So slightly concerned with 2 + hours running time. But lights go down. And the portentous tedium begins. Within ten I’m fast asleep. Within 15 my snores are apparently drowing out future space bots. Within 20 my lucky tinder date pokes me and says we’re leaving. Which we did. While I can’t claim it was the start of a long and beautiful friendship. She certainly saw the funny side and we lasted another year or so while avoiding the cinema entirely. Still never seen that pesky film though. Nor will, I suspect.

    • Andrei Tarkovsky’s The Sacrifice was my bold and some might say pretentious choice for a first date at the movies. It’s a very long, subtitled film about one man’s attempt to bargain with God over an impending nuclear holocaust. It is grey, gloomy and overflowing with existential angst. It got a great review in Time Out, so I thought this’ll make me look clever. I think we both got a bit bored, actually, but no harm done.

      Tarkovsky died shortly after the film’s release and I’ve rarely thought about it since. But I’m now regularly reminded of this first date from the most unlikely of sources – Burnley FC’s central defence – where James Tarkowski (different spelling but same pronunciation) plies his trade.

        • My first cinema date with my other half was Leaving Las Vegas. All those of you who have seen it, do cast your minds back to the grimmer details.

          All those of you who have not, a bulletpoint version is:
          alcoholism – suicide attempt – vicious pimp – anal gang rape – death during sex.

          We saw the funny side of this perilously bad choice and are still together 25 years later.

  35. This might annoy some people, but Once Upon A Time In America. There was a time channel 4 I think showed this in an edited form where it was split over two nights a week apart (it’s such a long film that I believe both parts were over 2 hours).

    Anyway I LOVED the first part. You had a bit of De Niro at the start, flashing back to earlier times and then a very touching and well filmed story about young boys growing up in Brooklyn. I couldn’t wait to see part two. And the part two seemed to be a load of gangster gubbins I couldn’t be bothered with.

    I know it comes full circle at the end with a bit of a twist, but really old Sergio could have made the film a lot shorter, focusing on the children stuff and just bookending it with the adult gangster stuff.

    • Totally agree about Once Upon… and I remember C4 breaking it into two parts. I think it was part of an actual De Niro season, along with the first showing of Goodfellas – which had the first X film I saw at the pictures. (be gone with your ’18’ nonsense)

  36. Never mind halfway through, me and the daughter just settled down to watch Malignant, a horror film from James Wan, writer-director of Saw and the excellent The Conjuring. We made it as far as the credits, when we realised that the terrible acting/script/direction was actually the film, and not a film-within-the-film. Life is too short to be watching rubbish.

    So we started watching the third series of Wolf Creek, having enjoyed the previous two…and made it to the first adverts. At least we’re making quick headway on our ‘to watch’ list.

  37. Arthur.
    Pissed up all the time = funny / Meets Lisa Minelli’s character, stops being pissed up all the time = considerably less funny.

    Mary Poppins.
    Hadn’t seen this for donkey’s years but a Christmas or so ago we settled down to watch it, and the first half – all the famous songs / cartoon characters – was brilliant… the last half was turgid.
    I think I came to the same conclusion when I was 7.

  38. WTF’s going on? I never, ever used to give up on films halfway through. Even the crappest ones got a full viewing. Even Godzilla vs Kong got a full viewing! But ever since this thread I haven’t been able to watch a film all the way through. It must be evil sorcery or something. First it was Licorice Pizza. When it became obvious that it just wasn’t going anywhere, I couldn’t face continuing. Then another one I can’t remember. Or maybe two. Then last night I tried watching Being The Ricardos with Nicole Kidman as Lucille Ball and Javier Bardem as Desi Arnaz. Surely interesting, no? Jeez it was dull. I’m curious to know what happens in the second half, but can’t face watching it to find out as I fear death by boredom. @fentonsteve, could you watch it and let me know?

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