Karl Urban 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 Karl Urban-whose latest project "Mortal Kombat II" releases in theaters today.

Karl Urban's Filmography Ranked:

16.The Loft (D+)

15.Priest (C-)

14.The Chronicles of Riddick (C)

13.The Bourne Supremacy (C) 

12.The Bluff (B-)

11.Riddick (B-)

10.Star Trek Beyond (B-)

9.Doom (B-)

8.Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (B-)

7.Acts of Vengeance (B) 

6.Red (B)

5.Star Trek Into Darkness (B+)

4.The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (B+)

3.Dredd (B+)

2.Star Trek (A)

1.Thor: Ragnarok (A)

Top Dog: Thor: Ragnarok (2017)

Taika Waititi coming in and revitalizing Thor after The Dark World turned the Norse God into the MCU's biggest liability as a solo movie headliner is one of the best things that's ever happened in the history of this massive franchise. Ragnarok is a big, colorful blast of a movie that is unafraid to get weird and show off Chris Hemsworth's underutilized range by turning Thor into this magnetic goofball who is finally forced to be vulnerable as his home faces extinction from his estranged sister Hela (Cate Blanchett in a delightful scenery-chewing villain turn).

Bottom Feeder: The Loft (2015)

It would be very hard to find a throwback sleazeball thriller attempt that's as misguided as The Loft. Belgian director Erik Van Looy-who is remaking his own 2008 movie Loft in English!-establishes a bafflingly serious tone for a movie with a logline that basically amounts to "five friends find a dead woman in the luxury apartment that they all use for their extramarital affairs and have to figure out who is responsible for this unidentified corpse before the authorities are alerted", none of the actors save for Matthias Scohenaerts-who also appeared in the original-invest any energy into trying to sell the fractures in the group's dynamic that this heinous crime has exposed and the obligatory avalanche of plot twists that arrives in the final act is too clumsily deployed to provide the intended seismic reconfiguring of the lens that the preceding events are viewed through. 

Most Underrated: Dredd (2012)

Plan and simple, Dredd fucking tips. The bloody, slow motion-driven action sequences hit like a truck, the simple plotting and confined apartment complex setting keep the suspense at a very high level throughout and the interactions between Urban's stoic brute Judge Dredd and Lena Headey's cartoonishly evil drug lord Ma-Ma are consistently electrifying. I would be absolutely overjoyed if Urban finally got his longstanding wish to get a sequel off the ground.

Most Overrated: Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003)

Being on an island when it comes to Return of the King is one of the loneliest places you can ever find yourself in the world of movie takes. The reality is that I was very underwhelmed by this as a kid and that feeling has stuck with me as an adult. Padding out the runtime by tacking on nearly an hour of inert drama following the destruction of the ring adds a huge anticlimactic streak to what is supposed to be this soaring conclusion to an epic story. Looking back on it now, I'd argue that this creative choice proved to be a harbringer of what was to come with Peter Jackson's drawn-out adaptation of The Hobbit. Perhaps, a rewatch of the full trilogy would unlock something that I missed all of those years ago but for now, I remain firm in my belief that this is easily one of the most overrated movies I've ever watched.