With the summer season winding down to its final weekend, we’ve already looked back at the best summer 2024 movies and the worst summer 2024 movies. Now, it’s time to look back at the five underrated summer 2024 movies.
You’ll notice at least two blockbuster hits on this list alongside a solid sci-fi/horror performer and two outright flops. That’s to be expected since summer films (Oppenheimer not withstanding) generally aren’t trying to be anything more than popcorn entertainment. But the very best movies on this list did more than just go through the motions. They helped the other films prove that people will still go to the movies… if there’s something that they really want to see at the cinema.
5. Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga
In retrospect, perhaps we were asking too much from Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga. It had the misfortune of coming nearly a decade after Mad Max: Fury Road, which is an all-time action classic. By comparison, Furiosa just came up short, and it turned out that audiences weren’t quite ready to embrace Anya Taylor-Joy as an action star in the same way they did Charlize Theron as the older Furiosa.
This film isn’t without its faults, but it’s by no means the disaster that the box office numbers suggest. There are a lot of great action sequences, especially the extended sequence where Furiosa has to fend off raiders on the road. Chris Hemsworth is still in his goofy phase as the main villain, Dementus, and it’s hard to take him seriously as a threat when Hemsworth keeps trying to be funny. But overall, Taylor-Joy did a good job in her role and it’s a solid, if not spectacular film.
4. Bad Boys: Ride or Die
Did you notice that some pundits questioned whether audiences would accept Will Smith again after he slapped Chris Rock at the Oscars a few years ago? It turns out that they didn’t care about that at all, as Smith’s aging action franchise churned out another hit with Bad Boys: Ride or Die.
Ride or Die isn’t quite as fun as the previous film, Bad Boys for Life, but it does make the stakes more personal for Mike Lowrey (Smith) and Marcus Burnett (Martin Lawrence), as their attempt to clear the name of their late captain, Conrad Howard ( Joe Pantoliano), sends both men on the run. The biggest plus for this sequel is that it didn’t forget about Mike’s son, Armando Aretas, as played by Jacob Scipio, who seems like he could be a future solo action star.
3. Alien: Romulus
Director Fede Álvarez came to the Alien franchise with a mandate to make it scary again. Alien: Romulus lived up to that promise by playing the hits. You’ve seen pretty much everything the film has to offer in the earlier movies, including the very disturbing-looking creature that closes out the story. But like a great cover band, Álvarez finds some unique spins on the material by making the familiar facehuggers and Xenomorphs more terrifying than they’ve been for the last 30 years.
There are also some surprising nods to the original Alien and even to Prometheus, which isn’t as beloved as the other films. Alien: Romulus may not have reinvented the wheel when it comes to Alien movies, but it proved that this is still a franchise that has some life to it.
2. Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes
While it follows the critically acclaimed Planet of the Apes reboot trilogy by Rupert Wyatt and Matt Reeves, Wes Ball’s Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes keeps Caesar’s memory alive. This new sequel not only reset the board with a new hero, Noa (Owen Teague), it also sets up an interesting dynamic going forward between him and Mae (The Witcher‘s Freya Allan), a human girl who he isn’t sure he can trust.
Kevin Durand also has a scene-stealing turn as the film’s villain, Proximus Caesar, who distorts the teachings of Caesar to pursue his own power. Proximus is very human-like in that way, and he made for a very compelling enemy for both Noa and Mae.
1. The Fall Guy
Because The Fall Guy spectacularly flopped at the beginning of summer 2024, it seems destined for an afterlife of ridicule. It’s based on a TV series that barely anyone remembers, and Universal expected that to pull in blockbuster numbers. Spoiler alert: It did not. But it’s too bad, because Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt made this one of the best action comedies of the summer.
The film took a lot of liberties with the source material … which it can get away with because the series has been off the air for the better part of four decades. In this incarnation, Colt Seavers (Gosling) is just an aging stunt man rather than a bail bondsman on the side. But Colt has to find a missing star, Tom Ryder (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), before his absence ruins the movie being directed by Colt’s ex-girlfriend, Jody Moreno (Blunt). It’s a funnier set up than it sounds, and this movie feels like a deliberate throwback to an older style of action comedy from the 1980s and ’90s. It didn’t work for everyone, but it’s easily the most underrated movie of summer 2024.
