Hits and misses Prequel

The prequel: the “Star Wars” prequel trilogy

Praise or pan?: A tough call. Credit George Lucas for eventually improving his series of three movies portraying Darth Vader’s rise to prominence. The first two prequels—“The Phantom Menace” and “Attack of the Clones”—were universally loathed for their wooden dialogue, laughable acting, and “so what?” storylines. The third, “Revenge of the Sith,” also had its share of groan-worthy line readings, but mercifully restored a sense of epic scope and sinister majesty to the series. Its story of the manipulations that turned Anakin Skywalker into Vader could’ve made a solid trilogy on its own.

The prequel: “Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom”

Praise or pan?: A whip-crackingly solid series entry. Viewers could be forgiven for not realizing “Temple of Doom,” the second film to feature Indiana Jones, takes place a year before its predecessor, “Raiders of the Lost Ark.” That’s because “Temple” is unique among prequels in that it doesn’t explain Indy’s origins or any of the events in “Raiders”; it merely creates another adventure in a manner more typical of sequels. It’s effective enough to suggest more prequels should do the same.

The prequel: “Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me”

Praise or pan?: Worth following, so long as you have a taste for uniquely eerie surrealism. Oddball auteur David Lynch backtracked from his cult TV series and made the week leading up to small-town high-schooler Laura Palmer’s death the focus of a theatrically released feature. The result isn’t one of his best films, but it’s more authentically visionary than most prequels, and its virtues and flaws are Lynchian to the extreme—it’s hypnotic, a little scary, a little kinky, a little overlong, and very, very strange.

The prequel: “Dumb and Dumberer: When Harry Met Lloyd”

Praise or pan?: The title says it all—the art of prequel-making does not get any dumberer than this. The Jim Carrey/Jeff Daniels-starring original was a satisfyingly uninhibited road movie. It was also so self-contained that any kind of follow-up seems like a joke. Seeing Lloyd and Harry meet as high-school students not only creates a mythology no one was asking for, it eliminates the very thing that made the first film special—the chemistry between Carrey and Daniels. Proof that studio executives should be required to pass an IQ test.

The prequel: “The Flintstones in Viva Rock Vegas”

Praise or pan?: Yabba Dabba Don’t! The addition of the Great Gazoo (played by a slumming Alan Cumming)—a tiny, wisecracking, green alien whose incongruous appearance in the Stone Age setting of the original cartoon series delighted only the very young and the very stoned—best exemplifies the film’s total disregard for the audience. Reductions in budget and star power following the successful original ensure that everything looks miserably cheap and the acting is phoned-in at best. Four words to make anyone nostalgic for Rick Moranis: Stephen Baldwin as Barney Rubble.

The prequel: “Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning”

Praise or pan?: Let’s put it this way: how many great prequels to unnecessary remakes have there ever been? Sure enough, this project was doomed from the start, following a revisiting of “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre” that replaced the gritty verisimilitude of the original with a glossy, post-MTV visual scheme. This tale of Leatherface’s beginnings delivered more information about the deformed killer than we needed to know—including the graphic depiction of his childbirth.

he prequel: “Hannibal Rising”

Praise or pan?: Once Anthony Hopkins’ erudite cannibal Hannibal Lecter chomped his way into pop-culture history, Hollywood graced him with a franchise of his own, the most puzzling entry being this origin story that doesn’t even feature Hopkins. French actor Gaspard Ulliel is suitably magnetic as the young Hannibal, though a bit wobbly attempting to mimic Hopkins’ Welsh-accented cadence. But the film neuters the iconic character through pat psychoanalysis (as a child, Hannibal witnessed his sister being eaten by cannibals—that explains it!). There are cheap thrills, but considering the pedigree of its predecessors, it was reasonable to expect more than just intermittent trashy fun.

The prequel: “The Godfather Part II”

Praise or pan?: Put simply, the absolute best of its kind. It’s the only prequel in history to win the Academy Award for Best Picture. Director Francis Ford Coppola gracefully cuts between Vito Corleone’s (Oscar-winning Robert De Niro) entry into the Mafia and grown son Michael’s (Al Pacino) attempts to expand the organization’s reach. Predecessor and prequel are now forever conjoined in the hearts of film lovers—a best-case scenario for an origin story.

From ‘Godfather’ to ‘Chainsaw,’ where will ‘Underworld’ fall?

Concocting a solid movie prequel is a delicate balancing act. Elaborate too much on what makes beloved characters tick and you risk losing their particular mystique. Withhold too much background and audiences will wonder why you bothered.

Which isn’t to say that “Underworld: Rise of the Lycans”—the Jan. 23 release illuminating the origin of the vampire/werewolf war depicted in the first two “Underworld” films—should be entirely discouraged. They may be few and far between, but worthy prequels do exist. We’ve compiled the winners, and losers, in Hollywood’s backward-looking franchises. —Brett Buckalew, Special to Metromix