Well despite the many low points of this year 2016
eventually revealed itself to be an exceptionally good year for cinema if you
were looking in the right places. But we are not going to talk about that
today. Instead we are taking a look back at the very worst products to crawl
out of the film industry over the past twelve months, the bile and slime of all
that is considered good and a danger to moviegoers everywhere.
Of course, one can only stand to see so many terrible films
in one year so naturally some films had to be excluded. I’m sure ‘Nine Lives’, ‘Yoga
Hosers’ and ‘Norm of the North’ were all atrociously terrible, but I only have
so much time on this earth and I can’t spend too much of it watching terrible
films.
But despite this I still have some dishonourable mentions
for films that struck that unique ground of being terrible but not worth the
effort to include them here. It seems that ‘The Divergent Series’ has finally
sunk itself with ‘Allegiant’ performing
so poorly that the final instalment has been cancelled from its movie status
and reduced to a TV Special for 2017. ‘Alice
through the Looking Glass’ was a headache inducing defacement of Lewis
Carol’s work. Talented directors like Duncan Jones and Justin Kurzel failed the
video game genre with the woeful ‘Warcraft’
and ‘Assassin’s Creed’. We were treated
to some stupidly joyless thrillers film in ‘Criminal’
and ‘Inferno’. We also had the
usual stupidity one could expect when your film states that it is “Produced by
Michael Bay” with ‘Teenage Mutant Ninja
Turtles: Out of the Shadows’ and ‘The
Purge: Election Year’. There’s also ‘Gods
of Egypt’ which only stays off due to how unintentionally hilarious it is,
being a film that I could actually imagine myself watching several times
whenever I’m in need of a laugh. Still a biblically terrible film, but a funny
one at that.
But wait there’s more, because I wanted to reserve a special
spot for the year’s biggest disappointment. A film I had high hopes for, even
defended in the build up to its release but ultimately rushed those dreams and
has only further angered me since I first saw it. That film is ‘X-Men: Apocalypse’. Following
the success of ‘Days of Future Past’ one would think the franchise might
finally craft a third act of a trilogy that was worth watching. But what we get
instead is a film that amounts to a two hour explanation of why Professor X is
bald. It is repetitive and derivative of its predecessors, hampers any
potential future storytelling the franchise could have had and boasts the most
generic end-of-the-world-plot a blockbuster of this nature could have. Watching
Oscar Isaac stomp around in an expressionless rubber suit, portraying a villain
with no singular motivation or depth of any kind may be one of the saddest
things I witnessed all year. There is not one prop, location or effect in the
entire film that looks remotely real. Most of the special effects consist of
poorly composited green screen and CGI props that are thrown at the audience
until their eyes start bleeding. The plot is jam packed with insulting
contrivances, sequel baiting subplots and pandering cameos from characters who
ultimately have little to zero impact on the story as a whole. It feels like it
was manufactured to be a lesser copy of a weak MCU film, filled with witty
banter, overly elaborate action sequences and a climactic city based battle
where the world falls apart in pixels behind the characters. But all of this is
just the start, now we get to the bottom ten.
10: Batman v
Superman / Suicide Squad
I admit I cheated here. But out of the two terrible DCEU
movies we got this year I could not pick between them and decided they each act
as a nice benchmark to start the list (basically saying, let’s start here and
see how low we can sink). First off, ‘Suicide Squad’ lacks any cohesive
structure, resembling one long drawn out action sequence that overall contains less
depth than a single frame of ‘Mad Max: Fury Road’. The movie is so poorly shot,
coloured and lit that I wondered if Warner Bros accidentally left their camera
on the sepia-tone setting. It’s clichéd, generic and uninspired in almost every
aspect, putting a great cast (and Jai Courtney) to waste. This is all without
mentioning its aggressively pandering soundtrack.
But none of this came as a surprise thanks to DC’s earlier
offering, ‘Batman v Superman’. We have seen superhero failures of the past be
intellectually insulting, creatively stunted, pretentiously self-righteous and
unfaithful to their source material. Now here comes ‘Batman v Superman that
manages to be all of that at once and more. Like ‘Suicide Squad’ it lacks all
cohesive structure with the first two acts becoming an exercise in how many
names and locations we can visit without a single establishing shot or any
narrative thrust to motivate the sightseeing tour. It’s all in the name of
establishing an overly convoluted and contrived plot that ultimately leads to a
rage inducing anti-climax that is resolved with the word “Martha”. Character
motivations and perronsalities shift rapidly from scene to scene, subplots are
brought up and never resolved and the movie even gives you the benefit of
seeing shoehorning in teaser trailers for upcoming instalments in the ultimate
middle finger to the audience and a nightmare scenario of franchise filmmaking.
Zack Snyder’s “visionary” direction amounts to recreating some comic panels
with an unconvincing and visually uninspired CGI explosion. The entire
production is a sheer train wreck from start to finish.
Both films are just as bad as each other and fans swarmed
anyone who stated so, sending death threats to critics, starting petitions to
remove any negative reviews of the films and rewarding them perfect scores on
sites like IMDB before they had even been released. They took it upon
themselves to tech those evil critics for doing what they are professionally
paid to do and voice their opinion about a movie they recently saw, justifying
themselves with accusation of corruption or the even more feeble excuse of “It’s
for the fans”. The latter excuse is essentially a different way of saying “This
movie is for the people who were going to love it regardless of its actual
quality anyway” so I hope you can see the irrelevance of that.
9: The 5th
Wave
Teen dystopian adaptations hit an all-time low here. Despite
some truly horrifying entries into the genre ‘The 5th Wave’ stands
as potentially the most pandering, intellectually stunted, emotionally
manipulative of them all. It wanders through its plot almost aimlessly,
borrowing every trope and cliché it can from every other film of this genre
that has preceded it. Worst of all is that unlike ‘Allegiant’ whose box office
failure tanked its entire franchise, ‘The 5th Wave’ managed to make
money which likely means we have two more of these garbage fires to look
forward to.
8: The Other Side
of the Door
As 2016 reaches its end and many discuss the good, bad and
ugly of the year gone by people seem to have overlooked ‘The Other Side of the
Door’ which in itself is a crime. This terrible excuse for a horror film is jam
packed with cheap jump scares, weak characterisations, offensively blatant
contrivances as well as a dozen plot holes that I honestly can’t blame anyone
for blocking it out of their memory. But at the same time it certainly should
not go unpunished.
7: Mother’s Day
It is a shame that Gary Marshall’s last film had to be tis
awful. I know some people who put aside the actual quality and enjoy the glitzy
schmaltz of ‘New Year’s Eve’ and ‘Valentine’s Day’. But with ‘Mother’s Day’ Marshall
crossed the line and overloaded us with so much cheap sentimentality, emotional
manipulation and ludicrously contrived reasons to waste a talented cast that it’s
maddeningly sickening. There is a scene in which Jack Whitehall plays a
comedian who wins a stand-up competition while simultaneously looking after his
infant baby. During the routine I heard plenty of laughter from the fake
audience watching him in the film, I heard none from the real audience watching
the film.
6: Independence Day:
Resurgence
The summer that went on forever is perhaps best epitomised
with this overblown and overstuffed extravaganza of soullessness. Instead of
having the fun popcorn entertainment and pulsating energy of ‘Independence Day’,
this sequel is a flat, overly convoluted, self-serious, humourless downpour
that is the perfect countermand to any goodwill one could take away from the
original. The CGI effects seek not to engage the viewer but to overwhelm them
by throwing as much at the screen as it possibly can. There is so little
substance to it that after watching it I felt malnourished.
5: Ben-Hur
The trend of Hollywood remakes hit an all-time low here
(that seems to apply to a lot of genres this year, as well as society in general)
by turning one of the most universally praised movies of all time into a
diabolical cash grab. It cuts out almost 100 minutes of runtime from the
original by leaving out silly things such as pacing, character development,
depth, atmosphere, motivations and subtleties. This leaves only the bare bones
of the story which results in an unmotivated and uninspired retelling that
comes across as unintentionally hilarious. To top it all off the film panders
to conservative audiences by being less politically correct than the 1958
version, cutting out homosexual undertones in favour of an extended torture
porn sequence of Jesus on the cross to remind us how we are all terrible
people.
4: Max Steel
I feel sorry for whoever thought this would be the next big
franchise. Or at least I would if anyone working on the film actually did
because I cannot accept that anyone involved in this production saw it as
anything other than a cheaply made attempt to do….actually I can’t work out
what this was trying to accomplish. It is too idiotically stupid to appeal to
anyone over the age of five and too bland and boring to appeal to anyone under
that age. Anyone who played with the original toys has long grown out of this
by now and everyone else didn’t even know this film existed. Films like ‘Max
Steel’ make people like me question what we are doing with our lives.
3: Collateral
Beauty
A film so terrible that any attempt I made to write a full
review of it descended into an angry and incomprehensible rant. With a
marketing campaign so blatantly false I’m surprised no one has tried to sue the
makers for false advertising (if that American woman can try to sue Nicholas
Winding Refn because ‘Drive’ wasn’t an action movie I can’t see why this can
get away scot-free). Who doesn’t want to see a film about a group of business executives
trying to prove their boss, Will Smith is clinically insane by exploiting his grief
over his dead daughter and hiring three actors to portray three abstract
concepts of Love, Time and Death to interact with Will Smith so they can
digitally remove the actors from security footage to make it appear as if Will
Smith is talking to himself, thereby definitely proving he is insane. I think
describing the plot of the film speaks for itself. The fact that it the film’s thematic
conceit is barely worthy of a an induction session in class at a community
college philosophy class and somehow convincing the likes of Will Smith, Edward
Norton, Helen Mirren, Kate Winslet, Michael Pena, Naomi Harris and Keira
Knightly to sign on for this crap is baffling, almost as baffling as the plot.
2: Dirty Grandpa
There have been a fair few horror films released in 2016,
yet none of them were as terrifyingly disturbing as ‘Dirty Grandpa’.
Incidentally that is not to be read as a criticism of said horror films. This “comedy”
is mind numbingly incompetent in every single regard that I’m still struggling
to envision anyone reading over this script and deciding it was anything other
than something disgusting smeared across a piece of paper. This is not just a
case of smart or dumb comedy, ‘Dirty Grandpa’ is so nauseatingly offensive but
at the same time so infuriatingly unfunny that it’s sickening. Crude and crass
humour can be funny, sometimes brilliantly so, but this film stays so far away
from anything that could be considered a joke, from the mild racism and
homophobia to the prolonged shot of Robert De Niro masturbating. It is a real
low point for 2016, but not quite the absolute worst, which leads me onto….
1: God’s Not Dead
2
I try not to drag politics into this, but in a year where
the entire world feels divided over differing beliefs it seems fitting that
this piece of propaganda should end up here. A film that seems to celebrate the
idea that the world is divided by race and religion, a film that endorses the
idea that some people are inferior depending upon their beliefs and argues that
we are currently in the middle of a war between the evil atheists and the
unsung perfect yet persecuted heroes, Christians. The plot defies all logic,
and is nothing more than a thin veil from which the film can scream its agenda
at the audience until either the viewer or the speaker passes out from exhaustion.
It’s not as blatantly aggressive as ‘God’s Not Dead’ in which the non-Christian
characters either die from car collisions, undergo domestic abuse or get
diagnosed with cancer. But the sequel does its best to prove that anyone who
isn’t a Christian is a conniving person filled with hatred and wants to cause
suffering to everyone in the world. It’s one thing to make a hypocritical piece
of propaganda, but for it to be as incompetently made, as poorly written and as
terribly acted as ‘God’s Not Dead 2’, then that just about clinches it. ‘God’s
Not Dead 2’, the worst movie of 2016.
So that’s by rundown of the year’s worst. For those
wondering I would normally have posted a list for the year’s best films as well
but sadly there are still a number of films that I have yet to see including ‘La
La Land’, ‘Silence’ and ‘Manchester by the Sea’. The likely scenario is that I’ll
be able to see them over the course of January so I’m hoping to finalise my
list within a month or less. As much as I would like to say “screw it” and just
make a list including the films I’ve already seen I know how frustrating it is
in a year’s time when a critic says “Here are my top ten films of 2017, by the
way six of these came out and were being discussed mainly in 2016 and by now
everyone is talking about a completely different set of films which I also have
yet to see”. If a film was released in 2016 I intend to see it and review it in
the context of 2016. As frustrating as it is I want to avoid clogging up next
year’s list with a load of year-old releases, having to ignore the existence of
some of my most anticipated movies of this year by not including them on my
annual list and being short changed for the number of quality films on my list
for this year. That’s is all then, bye.
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