Well...
I saw a production of Moliere's "The Imaginary Invalid" put on by the Oregon Shakespeare Festival a while back, and while it had its points, somewhere between a "see, this audience doesn't get references to Moliere, they're here for the fart jokes" gag and a shoehorned-in "live every minute to the fullest, life is brief" summing-up, I was digging my nails into my arm.
It didn't help that I'm painfully familiar with the tropes of commedia del arte (and, farther back, the Greek and Roman farces from which they evolved) that Moliere drew upon. It's one thing to rework old jokes for modern sensibilities, but somewhere between making jokes at the audience's expense and sitting through about three hours of jokes that might have gotten chuckles from the Caesars to be told that life is brief was a bit much to be borne.
Formula can be okay, sure. But the thing of it is, if you're going to use a formula that the audience is very familiar with, you damn well better get from the completely familiar 'a' to the quite predictable 'b' with a certain amount of style and flair. Certain cliches I have less sympathy for than others- I've commented on the "and then the man runs after the girl and/or humiliates himself in public" of many romantic comedies- but whatever the case, the more obvious formula you use, the less slack you get if you fail to perfrom with distinction within your self-created limitations.
"Avengers" did very well. But I lost all interest in ever seeing "Lock Out" without a large group of friends and copious quantities of alcohol when someone in the trailer un-ironically spouted the phrase "He's the best there is... but he's a loose cannon!"
