Yahoo Lifestyle 32 Movies From The 2000s That Aged Really, Really, REALLY Badly
A while back, Reddit user mnightshamalama2 asked in r/moviecritic, "What movies from the 2000s have already aged poorly?" and it turns out there are a LOT. Here are the ones people truly cannot bring themselves to appreciate anymore.
1."Bringing Down the House. I watched the first 10 minutes on Youtube the other day, but I had to nope out after Steve Martin and Betty White called Queen Latifah a negro. SMH."
"I tried to rewatch it recently because I loved it as a kid. I cringed so much and couldn't even get 30 min in because the stereotyping against Queen Latifah's character is straight-up racist."
"I remember liking it because of Eugene Levy. I rewatched a few years ago and couldn't stop cringing; it was truly awful."
2."Rewatching Clerks 2 after age 15 is an absolutely wild experience. Our relatable underdog protagonist sexually harasses his teenage coworker and presumably gets a rising woman of color fired, and then gets rewarded for it because someone he's nothing but rude to decides to give him a huge sum of money for literally no reason."
3."Hollow Man because...well...you know."
"Kevin Bacon turned invisible and almost immediately started sexually assaulting women. I love Paul Verhoeven, but yikes!"
4."I want to say Knocked Up, but I thought it was terrible even in 2007. Katherine Heigl was 100% right; the whole movie painted women as uptight, cold, and shrewish."
"Anything by Judd Apatow. Don't re-watch Knocked Up, 40-Year-Old Virgin, etc., if you'd like to retain your pleasant memories instead of replacing them with glaring and extremely casual misogyny, anti-gay jokes, and rape culture. Too bad because they were SO funny at the time."
5."Sweet Home Alabama. All the confederate flags and old-timey slang is wild."
"How it continues to fly under the WTF meter is beyond me because, MY GOD, is it problematic."
"I love that movie, but I'm always like, 'this is wild' when I watch it, lol."
6."I watched Bring It On last night for the first time since I was an adolescent. The blatant anti-gay stuff, sexualizing teenagers, promoting eating disorders, making light of sexual assault, Torrance's white-savior storyline...it was hard to watch."
"I also forgot to mention the fat-shaming."
7."The first two Transformers movies are just basically zoom-ins of Megan Fox's chest and ass. Also, there's a reference to a cumshot when one girl gets in the car with Shia LaBeouf's character."
8."White Chicks."
"I just watched this the other day with my wife, and I said, 'There is no way they could make this movie in 2024.' The movie is held up solely by outdated stereotypes and tropes."
"The roofie scene from White Chicks made me cringe really hard."
9."In The Hangover, at the beginning of the movie, Bradley Cooper is yelling, 'Paging doctor [f-slur]." Zero percent chance that flies today."
10."Lost in Translation. I get that there can be some humor in culture shock, but man, the movie took it too far. It took me out of it the last time I rewatched it."
"Lost in Translation seems widely inappropriate considering the vast age difference nowadays."
"Every Japan cliche you can think of, a couple of morose main characters, and no plot conflict or resolution equals cinematic genius. (Sarcasm.)"
"I just watched it for the first time last week, and I hated how the main guy was so entitled that everyone should speak English on his behalf. Everyone who loves it only liked it because of nostalgia. Scarlett is beautiful but empty. There are so many great things to try in Japan; they only drink alcohol and sing in karaoke bars all day. Garbage movie."
11."Remember The Titans was cringey when it came out; it's really bad now."
"It's still a great film, but the 'tough but fair' approach Coach Boone has in the film was [allegedly] more akin to bullying and hazing in real life. I believe his methods raised eyebrows even back in the '70s. The film — aside from one scene where he denies them water after training all day — has him much more balanced."
12."Norbit. It's a tasteless abusive relationship story that is so terrible that I'm certain it's used in Guantanamoo Bay."
13."Garden State has not aged well. It birthed the 'manic pixie dream girl' label. I do still love the movie and the soundtrack, but I see the point."
"I hated it when it first came out and still do. I found little that was 'Garden State' about it. That movie could have been set anywhere. And his shit friend is a grave robber."
14."The Pursuit of Happyness. I hate that movie so much. [Sarcasm] 'See, it's the American dream! Anybody can be successful in America. You just have to be in exactly the right place at the right time and have an underqualified rich white person give you a chance. If you, too, hustle hard enough, you can win the capitalist lottery. It's sooo inspirational!'"
15."40 Days and 40 Nights. A woman wins a bet with his friends that her ex-boyfriend can't go through the titular amount of days without sex by raping him. She collects the winnings and struts off into the night. Meanwhile, the male rape victim ends up begging for his new girlfriend's forgiveness for 'cheating on her.'"
16."The Blindside is probably the worst example of white saviorness in Hollywood. What a mess."
"My (white) principal in an urban school district thought it was a great idea to reward his students (who were 85% Black) by playing this movie. You can imagine what I was thinking as an employee at the time. Like, what message are we sending to our students? 'Hey, you too can get noticed by a rich white family and get out of the ghetto'???"
17."In the vein of The Blind Side, Radio."
"God, I remember the trailer showing Ed Harris saying, 'All this time we thought we were teaching Radio, but he was teaching us!' Shudder. How he said that glurge without barfing, I'll never know."
"Yeah, most of those 'intellectual disability inspiration porn' movies are awful garbage. Radio, in particular, adds race to it. ... There *are* definitely good portrayals of intellectual disability by non-intellectually disabled people, i.e., Gilbert Grape and Forrest Gump, arguably. But they're rare to come by, and most of them are sooo over the top to the point of becoming complete caricatures."
18."Frankly, I'm a little horrified that I ever found Anger Management even slightly amusing. Sexist, anti-LGBTQ, and treats sexual assault like a joke. That film is fucking disgusting."
19."Super Size Me, when it was revealed that Spurlock had a raging alcohol addiction during filming."
"They have done many studies since and couldn't produce the same results. He also massively overate and stopped exercising to try to get a more significant result. Nearly all of his issues are better explained by alcohol use and withdrawal."
20."You Don't Mess with the Zohan. Adam Sandler plays an Israeli counterterrorism agent who fakes his own death and moves to New York City to become a hairdresser. He saves a struggling salon by banging old women in the storage closet until experiencing erectile dysfunction due to falling in love with the salon's owner, a Palestinian woman."
21."Freedom Writers. The only thing stopping these ghettoized students from academic excellence was a well-meaning white woman telling them to believe in themselves."
"Now that I have been a high school teacher for ten years, it's so hard to watch. So much of it is sooooo cringe."
"She has the most well-behaved class of 'bad kids' from the get-go. She has a horrible work-life balance that no one should strive to emulate. The fact that she gets to stay with the same kids throughout high school goes against her mission. What a terrible movie."
22."I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry — it is just tons of 'making fun of gay people' jokes."
23."Captain Phillips, after it was revealed that he actually never followed any precautions and was actually warned about the pirates and brushed them off. Besides also being a total dickhead, he wasn't the one that left the boat and risked his life."
24."Shallow Hal."
"The thing that pisses me off about Shallow Hal is that with some tweaks, it could actually be a fun comedy about looking past looks, but instead, it goes out of its way to be the most juvenile, anti-trans film possible."
25."Get Him to the Greek, unfortunately. Jonah Hill, P Diddy, and Russell Brand. All shitty for unique reasons. Also, Jonah Hill's character gets sexually assaulted in one scene, and it's played as a joke. Yikes."
26."I used to teach on a Rez. One time, as a reward, I let the kids in my mentoring period pick out an approved movie from the library. They picked Windtalkers, which I had never seen. I was like, work. Nic Cage, Christian Slater, AND Adam Beech? Hell yes. That movie was straight white savior trash. The whole thing was about how hard it was for the white soldiers to maybe have to kill their windtalker interpreters if it looked like they might get caught. Such shit."
27."Waiting. I loved it in college. Now I don't think I can watch it again. I think a lot of the humor will just seem dull and cringey (maybe besides Luis Guzman), but especially the entire bit about Ryan Reynolds being a child predator and having to restrain himself from having sex with a girl under 18 until her birthday in a few weeks…pretty ew. Weird to think that shit was just played off as funny in the mid-2000s, and we all just went along with it."
"Ryan Reynolds plays a sex offender who's an aging townie that's obsessed with fucking minors. They simply refer to it as being a 'pervert.'
They play a 'game' at the restaurant where the guys all show each other their balls in creative ways, and if you get tricked into looking, they get to kick you for being gay.
Most of the movies mentioned in this thread were bad when they were released, while Waiting was edgy, and we realized soon after that the uneasy feeling by most of its 'edgy' humor was actually because most of those themes and topics were pretty fucked up.
What's most fucked up is how ACCURATE a depiction it is of working in a corporate family restaurant. Right down to all the fucked up stuff I mentioned. This wasn't some writer expressing their inner fucked up thoughts and humor in a fictional story. No. ... The culture of working in those restaurants is extremely accurately depicted. I don't work in restaurants anymore, so I hope it's not like that anymore."
28."What Women Want."
"Isn't that the movie Mel Gibson drops a hairdryer in the bathtub, and instead of dying, he hears women's inner monologues? YIKES."
"It portrayed women as shallow, basic, and uninteresting; their thoughts were always revolving around boys, clothes, and diets. Besides, the MC used his "gift" to manipulate women into sleeping with him, to steal their ideas, and eventually to win their hearts without actually trying to understand them. The whole movie made it seem like all women are the same: annoying, unfunny, and not very smart. The predictable plot just adds to it."
29."Love Actually. ... Anyone defending this movie should be ashamed. The way they dressed Emma Thompson as a frumpy frump and then had her stay with her trash, cheating, Snapey husband is the only reason you need to throw this film in the garbage — but you can also choose one of the other 739 problematic things in this movie."
"Nearly every storyline is problematic, and I don't find anything in it to be 'feel good.' I can't even bring myself to hate watch it."
"Andrew Lincoln being a creeper, the 'fat girl,' the guy horning on the woman who doesn't speak English...so many issues."
30."I don’t know how Crash was ever okay."
"Corniest shit I've ever seen. It's like if a middle-schooler decided to make a movie about race relations and missed literally everything that makes it nuanced."
"It felt like an attempt to make a movie on a serious subject using the overused film features at the time of ensemble casts and spoof movies that would try to intertwine way too many plots. Like they tried to take the square peg of Love Actually and jam it through the round hole of racism. It didn't work. I also can't think of a movie where I was more surprised when it ended. The credits just started rolling."
"My god, it has to be Crash. Not only is this movie already painfully dated to the point of actually being a little racist and gross, but way back in the heady days of '04 or '05, it won Best Picture over Brokeback Mountain and a whole host of other good films.
And yet, somehow, this piece of garbage movie where a racist cop sexually assaults a Black woman and then is 'redeemed' by saving her from a burning car. A movie full of nothing but dumb stereotypes that features Ludacris talking about racial profiling in LA and how everyone thinks Black men are criminals before pulling a gun on someone and stealing his car. Like, come on."
31."I always get flack for saying this, but Van Wilder is basically unwatchable to me now. That scene where he jerks off his dog and fills donuts with its semen, then feeds them to Tara Reid's boyfriend's frat…what a fun prank, right? There's plenty more to say about the movie and the constant 'the woman is the prize' theme, but the dog cum scene alone just makes me never want to put it on again."
32.And finally, I'm pretty sure this one raised eyebrows from the start, but we'll end with Tiptoes, which cast Gary Oldman as a person with dwarfism and employed some...interesting cinematic tricks (like sticking him on a sofa with fake legs) to make him look smaller.
Suggested by u/ItsSoLitRightNow
"I'm sure Gary Oldman is out there, screaming every time someone remembers that this film exists."
"I was up at 3 a.m. while staying with my dad. I was flipping through cable stations, and I came across this movie. I kept watching, waiting for the punchline. Something. I could not wrap my head around it being real. When it was over I did a mad google search and again, could not comprehend that it was real. I think I still don't think it's real? It's not that old. How could it be real? Are my eyes real?"
"Sewing Gary Oldman into a sofa with little Kermit legs hanging out was peak cinema."
If this sounds like a bad joke to you, you need to watch the trailer here. It's real.
What other movies do you think aged poorly? Let us know in the comments!
Submissions have been edited for length/clarity.
