Dominic Corry: These are the year's biggest film failures

It's been a great year for film, but there's no denying that some movies fell far short of their potential. Here's Dominic Corry's list of the five most disappointing films of 2015

5. The Gunman

No massive expectations here, but this languid action thriller with not enough action and zero thrills took itself so seriously, it practically demanded audience rancor. I'm all for an action movie with pretensions, but it has to be not insanely boring.

Sean Penn goes out of his way to angst up his tormented assassin, delivering another performance that is 90 per cent grimacing. It's as boring and self-serious as clear-inspiration Taken wasn't.

4. Spectre

The unexpected weight of Skyfall introduced genuine dramatic tension back into Bond, and it wasn't unreasonable to expect something along similar lines in the follow-up.

Instead Spectre went the Star Trek Into Darkness route of relying on the widely anticipated reveal of a villain's true identity for its drama. The film opened with a franchise highlight action set-piece, but failed to follow it up with anything as cool. Also they wasted Bautista.

3. Project Almanac

Alongside the next entry on this list, Project Almanac is leading modern Hollywood's war on the colon. For this reason alone, it deserves singling out. It was also a complete waste of a potentially awesome time travel premise.

More warning bells should've rung when the film was retitled (from the way more awesome Welcome to Yesterday) and delayed. The finished product reeked of endless retooling and plot simplification. I'm still trying to work out why they needed a time machine to attend a local music festival.

2. Terminator Genisys

The new Terminator rights holders talked a big game ahead of the film's release, and the franchise's rocky path ever since 1991's Terminator 2: Judgement Day made the prospect of course-correction especially tantalising.

But the circular, logic-free plot and nostalgia-meets-reboot casting confused the film's identity to the point where nothing mattered. Plus the action was sub-par and digital young Arnie was far less convincing than promised. It takes a special kind of crappiness to force a critical reconsideration of Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines. This did it.

1. Fantastic Four

How do they keep messing this up? It's the World's Greatest Comic Magazine for freak's sake! All the tension around the making of the film no doubt didn't help, but it appears that Fox was hoping to do this on the cheap from the get-go.

If any comic book adaptation demanded the widest scope possible, it's Fantastic Four. There is no "narrow" version of this story. Just think of what Kevin Feige and company could achieve with these characters in the Marvel Cinematic Universe - their big, bright and character-centric approach is just what the Fantastic Four needs. Instead we got small, grey and pointless. My 13-year-old Fantastic Four-obsessed self wept.

• What were your biggest disappointments of 2015?