At the Movies With Peter Travers: Best and Worst Comic-Book Movies
With two new terrible films entering theaters this week — the Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson in kids’ action film Race to Witch Mountain and the superfluous Last House on the Left remake — Peter Travers recommends that if you haven’t seen Watchmen yet, you should. If you’ve already seen it, you could watch another of Travers’ favorite comic-book films, which is the topic of this week’s At The Movies.
They’re two different Batman films made by two directors in two decades, but both The Dark Knight and Tim Burton’s first Batman film top Travers’ list of favorite comic-book adaptations. Travers praises the Dark Knight‘s dark portrayal of the comic and Heath Ledger’s Academy Award-winning role as the Joker, while the original Batman featured a stand-out performance by Michael Keaton, still the best ever to don the cape. Other films on Travers’ must-see list: Spider-Man 2, Iron Man and the monochromatic Sin City, which featured the true comeback of actor Mickey Rourke.
For every great comic book movie, there’s 10 bad ones, and Travers has selected five of the worst to place into his Scum Bucket.
Fantastic Four starring Jessica Alba was one of the worst superhero films ever to hit the screen. But it made money, so producers decided it would be a good idea to make another, somehow ever worse sequel Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer. And now they’re in the Scum Bucket, where they’ll be joined by other duds like League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, an adaptation so bad that Watchmen creator Alan Moore wants nothing to do with Hollywood ever again, Stallone’s Judge Dredd and the worst of the Batman saga, the George Clooney laughfest Batman & Robin.
Which great comic book films did Travers forget? Do you think Catwoman, Elektra and X-Men 3 are somehow worse than the Fantastic Four? Email the Rolling Stone movie critic at