15 Great Scenes In Bad Movies

Obviously, what qualifies a movie as good or bad is up to personal opinion. There are plenty of movies widely considered to be "bad" that there's still an audience for, especially cult movies like "The Room" or "Troll 2," as well as acclaimed movies that aren't as beloved by audiences as they are critics. However, there's a lot less wiggle room in debating what makes or breaks a specific scene in a movie, as plenty of great movies can be ruined by bad scenes, and bad movies can be saved by one good scene.

While most of these films we're about to focus on are disliked by a majority of audiences, they all have at least one scene that remains memorably great in spite of the rest of the film's quality. Even some terrible movies by great directors contain moments where one actor rose above the material given to them, transcending a movie's goodness or badness to deliver just one moment where you might've forgotten you were watching a bad movie altogether. 

Here are a bunch of great scenes in some bad movies.

The original "Grase" starring John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John is a tough act to follow, which is one of the biggest gripes audiences had with "Grease 2" when it came out in 1982. Given that Travolta and Newton-John aren't even in the film, their roles ostensibly taken by new characters played by Maxwell Caulfield and Michelle Pfeiffer, many critics saw it as a worse retread of the first movie's beats. However, there's one musical number worth remembering, all thanks to Pfeiffer's star-making performance.

In the scene, Caulfield's Michael asks out Pfeiffer's Stephanie, but she rebuffs his advances by singing a song about her high expectations for love, called "Cool Rider." Maybe it's just Pfeiffer's star power on display, but the sequence is more gripping than any other performance in the sequel that truly didn't need to happen. Perhaps it was all worth it just to put Pfeiffer on the map ahead of her role in "Scarface," which came out the year after "Grease 2" underperformed at the box office. 

It's no secret that film adaptations of video games have a poor track record, and many consider "Street Fighter" one of the worst video game movies of all time. Despite being written by Steven E. de Souza, the writer behind films such as "Die Hard" and "The Running Man," "Street Fighter" was his feature-length directorial debut, and it's unsurprising the writer hasn't directed a film since. Although the cast features the likes of Jean Claude Van-Damme and Kylie Minogue, the real star here is Raul Julia, who plays the film's antagonist, M. Bison.

It's possible that a lot of the affection for Julia's performance in "Street Fighter" is tied to the fact he passed away months before the film released, making M. Bison his first posthumous role. However, that would be discrediting how chilling it is when M. Bison tells Chun-Li (Ming-Na Wen), "For you, the day Bison graced your village was the most important day of your life. But for me... it was Tuesday." Few lines of dialogue sum up just how cold and callous a villain is quite like this one, making it easily the best scene in the film all thanks to Julia's commitment to the role. 

Although many younger fans have an affinity for these films, it's safe to say that, for most audiences, the "Star Wars" prequels destroyed the franchise. The first episode in the Skywalker saga, "Episode 1: The Phantom Menace," is often cited as the worst of the worst. For some, it's the wooden acting, for others, it's the poorly-aged visual effects, and for many, it's the presence of Jar-Jar Binks. Nevertheless, the film also contains one of the best-choreographed fight scenes in the entire franchise.

Dubbed the "Duel of the Fates," after John Williams' musical accompaniment, the scene sees Darth Maul (Ray Park) battling Qui-Gon Jinn (Liam Neeson) and Obi-Wan Kenobi (Ewan McGregor), a fight which results in the tragic death of Kenobi's mentor. After Kenobi enacts revenge on Maul by slicing him in half, he has a moment with the dying Jedi Master in which the care of a young Anakin Skywalker (Jake Lloyd) is entrusted to Kenobi. For many, this is such a pivotal moment to the trilogy, as it is Kenobi's failure as a mentor to Anakin compared to Qui-Gon that ultimately sets the young Skywalker on a path to becoming Darth Vader. 

Molly Shannon is far from being an underrated "Saturday Night Live" cast member, given that she originated characters on the sketch show including Sally O'Malley and Terri Rialto of NPR's "Delicious Dish." By far her most famous contribution to the "SNL" oeuvre is Mary Katherine Gallagher, an awkward Catholic school girl who sticks her hands under her armpits and then sniffs them when she's nervous. Given the character's breakout success in the late '90s, Gallagher was given her own movie, 1999's "Superstar," though critics found the movie unfunny and the character unlikable in it. 

That being said, there's one scene these critics are underselling, and it happens after Mary is humiliated out of auditioning for the school talent show by having blue paint dumped on her. Brought to a pool by bad boy Eric Slater (Harland Williams), Mary confesses to him the depths of her self-loathing, and Shannon's performance is truly heart-wrenching as she says, "I just hate the way I am." When Slater tells her she looks beautiful? That makes "Superstar" feel like so much more than an "SNL" spin-off movie. 

The attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 was one of the most devastating moments in American history, so it's no surprise it would inspire a movie set during the attacks. However, the tragedy didn't deserve the "Titanic" treatment of centering the narrative of 2001's "Pearl Harbor" around a love triangle between two combat pilots (Ben Affleck and Josh Hartnett) and a nurse they meet in the army (Kate Beckinsale). Critical reaction to the movie was appropriately scathing towards its story as well as its racist undertones, but at least they got one thing right.

That one thing is the attack on Pearl Harbor, occurring halfway through the film, which director Michael Bay received praise for from critics. For a film mostly concerned with a half-baked love story, spending an extended sequence not shying away from the horrors of the attack makes for a diamond in a rough film. The set-piece along makes the film worthy of being called one of the best movies set in Hawaii, even if the rest of the movie surrounding it is tone-deaf and mismatched. 

Back to the topic of video game adaptations, 2005's "Doom" is far from the best Dwayne Johnson movie, but it's not even the best one that's based on a video game (if you consider the "Jumanji" films to be video game movies). However, this film by Andrzej Bartkowiak at least remains faithful to the source material, if only for one sequence. That sequence, towards the end of the film, sees Karl Urban's Reaper navigating a Mars research facility in first-person perspective, imitating the look of the shooter game for a full action oner. 

Maybe it's the fact that the sequence itself was not directed by Bartkowiak, who is responsible for the film's wooden dialogue and odd tones, but by visual effects supervisor Jon Farhat, who utilized a Steadicam and 15 individual takes composited together through VFX. Though even the cast that was involved in the film have expressed regret over how it turned out, this scene alone won over many video game fans, including critics at IGN, who called the first-person scene "easily the coolest and most invigorating sequence 'Doom' has to offer." 

While "Pearl Harbor" may have been the worst decision of Michael Bay's career, using Linkin Park songs in not one but three of his "Transformers" films was generation-defining, to say the least. The original song "New Divide" from the second film might be one of the band's most iconic tunes, but you simply can't find a moment more iconic than the needle drop of "What I've Done" at the end of 2007's "Transformers." What makes this one of the best moment from the "Transformers" film franchise is the monologue delivered by Optimus Prime during it. 

Many critics may have lampooned "Transformers" for being a dumb action movie, but you can't not get chills hearing the iconic voice of Peter Cullen uttering the words "I am Optimus Prime, and I send this message to any surviving Autobots taking refuge among the stars: We are here. We are waiting." And if that's not goosebump-inducing enough, Chester Bennington's equally iconic voice following as "Directed By Michael Bay" is the stuff of meme legends.

In theory, "X-Men Origins: Wolverine" should've been a slam dunk for 20th Century Fox. A prequel to 2000's "X-Men" starring Hugh Jackman as Wolverine based on the iconic "Weapon X" comic book arc, the film also included new cast members like Liev Schreiber as Sabretooth and Ryan Reynolds as Wade Wilson, and it could have made fans' greatest dreams come true. Unfortunately, between its unsatisfying story, inferiority to the original "X-Men" trilogy, and the absolute butchering of Deadpool's screen debut, "X-Men Origins" pissed off more fans than not. 

Even though it might be the worst live-action movie featuring Wolverine, it does have one scene that slaps. Early on, Jackman's Logan and Schreiber's Victor Creed, both subject to extended lifetimes and a healing factor through their mutations, fight in the Civil War, World War I, World War II, and in Vietnam. While the montage is essentially used as an opening credits sequence, it's easily the most visually stunning and comic book-esque group of scenes in the entire film. If anything, it makes us wish we could have an entire movie of Jackman's Wolverine fighting in World War II a la "Saving Private Ryan." 

To give "Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief" some credit, it did establish the careers of both Logan Lerman and Alexandra Daddario, who have both gone on to do great things in film and TV. However, as an adaptation of Rick Riordan's 2005 teen lit novel, it's not very good at surpassing its source material. The one exception to this is in the film's "Lotus Casino" sequence, a play on the island of Lotus-eaters from Greek mythology who entrap sailors with their amnesiac fruit. 

Reimagined as a Las Vegas casino, Percy (Lerman), Annabeth (Daddario), and Grover (Brandon T. Jackson) are lured into wasting time during their mission of finding Zeus' lightning bolt and end up having fun in a casino, set to the 2010-appropriate soundtrack of "Poker Face" by Lady Gaga. Maybe it's the campiness, or the fact that the trio of actors seem like they're having genuine fun, but it's hard not to smile while watching this part of the movie. However, if you want a much better series-length retread of this familiar adventure, we'd recommend Disney+'s "Percy Jackson & the Olympians" series starring Walker Scobell. 

"Movie 43" was an epic disaster, roping in some of the biggest stars into the most abhorrently terrible and crude short films that have ever graced the big screen. Each short will make you incredibly disappointed in the A-listers that agreed to appear in them, from those who didn't need the credit (Kate Winslet, Gerard Butler, Richard Gere) to those who were very early in their acting careers (Jeremy Allen White, Chloë Grace Moretz). However, even among this horrifically bad anthology, there's one saving grace: a short called "Veronica."

"Veronica" follows a confrontation between grocery store clerk Neil (Kieran Culkin) and his ex Veronica (Emma Stone), morphing from argument to sexual flirtation to pathetic yearning. As the conversation gets more and more grotesque, it becomes apparent that it's broadcasting over the loudspeaker to the entire grocery store. It's not that the writing in this is any good (it's not), but more that Stone and Culkin show their future Oscar-winning acting chops can elevate even the dumbest of material.

"Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets" isn't just a mouthful of a movie title, but it's also a forgettable sci-fi film based on a comic book series from the 1960s. It might be admirable that its writer and director, Luc Besson, self-financed the project, making it the most expensive indie movie ever made, but only if the end product was anything worth writing home about. Our own Peter Sciretta praised the film's "visually stunning, gleefully inventive, unpredictable and bonkers insane" first half, but criticized the second for being "more formulaic [and] far less exciting." 

By far the most bonkers insane moment in "Valerian" has to be the surprise Rihanna cameo. In the film, Rihanna plays a shape-shifter named Bubble who, in one scene, seduces the titular character played by Dane DeHaan with an extensive dance number, complete with costume changes and musical accompaniment. Though it's never not odd to see the film basically stop dead in its tracks for a wordless Rihanna music video, you can't deny that the pop star is simply made for this type of performance. Speaking of pop stars...

There's few good things to say about Tom Hooper's "Cats," but of those good things, Taylor Swift is one of them. As Hoai-Tran Bui wrote in our review, "Its flashes of brilliance feel like happy accidents and its uncanny technical choices are never overcome," as the famous Broadway musical doesn't translate so well to the big screen. Performances by actors like James Corden, Rebel Wilson, and Judi Dench are perplexing to the eye, but Swift, Jason Derulo, and Jennifer Hudson all made good use of their, albeit visually horrific, screentime.

Swift, for her part, appears briefly in the film as Bombalurina, who sings the praises of Idris Elba's villainous Macavity. It's the one part of the film that got consistent praise from critics, likely because, of the entire cast, few have made theater-esque performances and cats part of their brand as much as Swift has. Swift also contributed an original song, "Beautiful Ghosts," to its soundtrack, and while she doesn't sing the version used in the film, it's a stunning vocal performance and a worthy addition to the iconic musical's tracklist. 

"A Christmas Carol" is a story that's been done to death at this point, whether it's Bill Murray's modern take in "Scrooged," Jim Carrey's nightmare fuel version directed by Robert Zemeckis, or even the Muppets' definitive version of the Charles Dickens tale. Netflix's animated musical "Scrooge: A Christmas Carol" is no exception to this story's overexposure, despite a strong voice cast including Luke Evans, Jessie Buckley, and Olivia Colman. However, it has one stand-out original song written for the Netflix movie: "Later Never Comes."

This song sees an older Scrooge watching his former love, Isabel, walk out on him for focusing more on his business than her. While Isabel laments Scrooge's disregard for her, an older Scrooge criticizes his younger self for not paying attention, and both Evans and Buckley completely own the moment with their high notes. Nevertheless, this song's strong emotional resonance doesn't make up for the rest of the film's lack of originality. 

Ridley Scott's movies include some of the greatest films ever made, like "Alien," "Gladiator," and "The Martian," but he's been on a generational run lately. And by generational run, we're talking about the back-to-back terrible movies he's been making, like "Gladiator II," "The Last Duel," and of course, "Napoleon." In theory, "Napoleon" should've been right up Scott's alley, casting Joaquin Phoenix as the French dictator with a supporting cast including Vanessa Kirby and Rupert Everett, but it's littered with bloated action sequences, historical inaccuracies, and clumsy storytelling. 

If "Napoleon" has any saving graces, it's the on-screen chemistry (or lack of it) between Phoenix and Kirby, who capture the bickering between Napoleon and Josephine in some of the film's best scenes. In one dinner argument, Napoleon threatens divorce if Josephine doesn't give him a child, and she retorts by calling him fat, to which Napoleon responds, "Destiny has brought me here. Destiny has brought me this lamb chop." Maybe the moment is unintentionally funny, but Phoenix surprisingly sells it. 

"The Gorge" is about as good as you'd expect for an action movie that went straight to Apple TV+, but its best asset is the Anya Taylor-Joy and Miles Teller romance that grounds it. The duo play snipers placed on opposite sides of a massive gorge, tasked with disposing of monsters that emerge from it. Against their orders, they make contact using sheets of paper (a la Taylor Swift's "You Belong With Me" video) and, surprisingly, end up falling for each other over an extended period of time. 

In one montage sequence, Levi (Teller) and Drasa (Taylor-Joy) bond over the holidays, and there's even Easter eggs referencing Teller's role in "Whiplash" and Taylor-Joy's in "The Queen's Gambit." A cover of "Oh Come All Ye Faithful" by Twisted Sister plays over the adorable scenes, as the two assassins build snowman replicas of each other. Overall, it's a very cute scene that's completely carried without dialogue by Taylor-Joy and Teller, whose chemistry is on display even from afar.