Ric Roman Waugh Ranked

Welcome to "Ranked", a weekly series where I rank a franchise or filmography from worst to best and hand out assorted related superlatives. This week, I'm profiling the work of Ric Roman Waugh-whose latest project "Shelter" opens in theaters today. 

Ric Roman Waugh's Filmography Ranked:

7.Greenland 2: Migration (B-)

6.Angel Has Fallen (B-)

5.Kandahar (B)

4.Snitch (B)

3.Greenland (B)

2.Shot Caller (B)

1.Felon (B)

Top Dog: Felon (2008)

While Waugh has maintained a pretty solid quality standard over the past 20 years or so, I'm inclined to give his breakout feature Felon a slight edge over Shot Caller, Greenland and Snitch for this title. Felon is a really solid prison drama about a family man (Stephen Dorff) who loses sight of who he is after being sent to a corrupt, violent prison after receiving a questionable sentence for involuntarily manslaughter after accidently killing an armed robber with a baseball bat on his property that somehow got buried as a direct-to-video title in 2008 and it's a testament to the power of the video store/cable culture of that era that it went onto to find an audience. 

Bottom Feeder: Greenland 2: Migration (2026)

Greenland marked the rare disaster movie that focused more on the human element of an apocalyptic weather event than the event itself. The sequel Greenland 2: Migration abandons that storytelling philosophy to an extent in an effort to up the ante and it leads to an inferior product. While I'm not going to say that it completely stinks since the significant increase in weather events leads to some tense sequences, these setpieces just happen to come at the cost of stripping away what made its predecessor stand out from other movies in the genre. 

Most Underrated: Shot Caller (2017)

Shot Caller is pretty much a carbon copy of Felon right down to the slipping through the cracks of the Hollywood distribution machine aspect. Still, it's a compelling, gritty movie about how prison can make monsters of decent people and Nikolaj Coster-Waldau does really great work in the lead role of Jacob Harlon-who pleads guilty to a DUI and quickly gets caught up in the pervasive gang culture in the Los Angeles-area prison he was sentenced to. 

Most Overrated: None

Despite directing movies for about 25 years now, Waugh has never made anything that has generated overly passionate reactions on either end of the spectrum. Some people would call him a "journeyman" because of this, but I'd call him a steady hand who can be counted onto to do solid work across a number of genres.