It's that time of year again for my yearly wrap-up. Honestly, I love doing these because it gives me an excuse to reflect on the movies I loved and the ones I love to hate. Again I didn't see every movie that came out this year and it would be unfair to call any movie "the worst" if I hadn't seen it. So, if there's one on here you saw and it was just god awful or the most amazing thing you've ever seen, chances are I just didn't see it.
But first, a few (dis)honorable mentions. These are movies I didn't see, but given all the buzz about them, I probably would've hated them. First, The Devil Inside. Oh my God what a nightmare of a movie. This is probably going to be the number one on a lot of lists for the worst ever. It's not on mine only because I didn't see it. The thing about this one is that it not only was a really bad movie, but wasn't finished. The ending literally cut to black and then told you to go to the internet website of the movie to see how it ended. Whoever made this movie should be mailing rebate checks to every moviegoer that saw it.
Nor did I see One For the Money. There's just something about the poster featuring Katherine Heigl with her back to me looking over her shoulder that is less cutsy and more like a Siren's call; leading me ever witlessly to smash on the rocks so her crappy movie could eat my soul. All I have to say about this is Jennifer Aniston did it better in The Bounty Hunter and that movie sucked too.
With that out of the way, let's take a look at the bad, the ugly, and the unholy abominations I sat through this year.
10) FLIGHT: For as good an actor as Denzel Washington is, this just wasn't the movie promised to us from the trailers. This movie had so little to do with flying and much more about this one guy's habitual drinking problem. And when your movie is over two and a half hours long and it only wants to talk about the evils of drinking, it gets old and fast. It doesn't help that for the entire movie we see just how much of a prick this guy Whip truely is and I couldn't wait for him to go to prison. He isn't a tragic figure. He's a mugging, manipulative jackass who really got lucky he got that plane down without killing everyone. The movie is too long and there's just nobody in the whole movie I liked.
9) GOON: Oh they aren't done ripping off Happy Gilmore just yet. What really pissed me off about this whole thing is that I'm a hockey fan and, shock of shocks, I like to watch hockey players play hockey. I'm not one of those guys that goes purely to see a fist fight on ice. But in this movie that's all you get. THEY DON'T PLAY HOCKEY! EVER! It's all about how quickly we can get this soft talking cave man on skates in the penalty box and off to see his nymphomanic girlfriend or his stereotypical Jewish parents. To hell with this movie.
8) LAWLESS: How hard is it to figure out who the protagonist of the story should be? This movie keeps insisting that it is Jack (LeBeouf) but in all reality it should be Forrest (Hardy). Instead of following along the charming, quirky, and sometimes downright brutal Forrest Bondurant, we're stuck hanging out with the whiny little worm Jack. Every twist in this movie is so horribly telegraphed if you don't know how the movie ends after the first 5 minutes, you just don't know anything about foreshadowing.
7) PROJECT X: THIS IS NOT A MOVIE! This is some moron with a hand held camera showing us his home movie from a wild party... FOR AN HOUR AND A HALF! The only way this movie could be any more boring and pointless was if we saw it as a slide show. Oh yeah, when the ending of your movie resembles the ending of a rambling Monty Python sketch, find another line of work.
6) PROMETHEUS: The worst part of the movie was the expectation of rejuvenating the Alien series. Instead we get a lot of lip service and ten feet tall albinos. No face huggers, no zenomorphic aliens until the stinger/sequel bait at the very end of the movie. How can this be an Alien prequel if there aren't any Aliens? I said it before, and I'll say it again, this movie had more in common with The X-Files than it does with Alien. Maybe it should've taken a few dollars away from making it look pretty and got a better story.
5) TOTAL RECALL: Sometimes I'm just blown away by how much someone can take an existing story and make it virtually unrecognizable. Let's take a look at what was taken out: Mars... gone. Mutants... gone. Ambiguity... gone. These are not minor details. They are the basis for the entire 1990 Schwarzenegger film! An evil company is surpressing the natural atmosphere on Mars to enslave the people and hold on to a manopoly of breathable air. Anyone who tries to leave the dome is either killed or horribly mutated. It's up to a lowly grunt to save the planet... or was it all in his head? In this "remake" it's more about one city not exploiting another. Whooptie do. The whole thing felt smaller and far more convoluted while giving the least amount of fan service possible. The only saving grace this movie has is that it wasn't a remake of Blade Runner. God help you if you do the same thing to Blade Runner.
4) SAFE: If I didn't bother to watch the first or third acts of this movie, it might be alright. But the fact that it can so screw up the most basic elements of storytelling means it has to be over the Total Recall abomination even though I enjoyed Safe far more than Total Recall. It's something I keep repeating but feel just a little more sad every time I do. If you kill off a supporting character without us ever seeing her or learning her name, I DON'T CARE IF SHE DIES! Also, in a popcorn flick like this that builds up to a one-on-one ninja fight and then deprive the audience of said fight, I question your ability to locate your buttocks with both hands and a road map.
3) GHOST RIDER - SPIRIT OF VENGANCE: The way this movie is shot makes it almost unwatchable. Add in a story that undermines the very premise of the story and you have a recipe for utter disaster. Why does God need a starship? He doesn't. Why does the Devil need a bounty hunter? He doesn't. They give some lip service answer about being less powerful while walking around in his meat suit on Earth, but I still call BS on that. Not even watching Nic Cage mugging for the camera saves this. This really has to rank up there with Howard the Duck as one of the worst Marvel Comics movie of all time.
2) A THOUSAND WORDS: Let me get this straight... you're going to get a comedian whose whole gimmick is that he's a fast talking loudmouth and then make him shut up for the whole movie? Why? So his character can learn something about humility? How does that work again? Then there's the hallmark card philosophy of Dr. Sinja who I think was as more surprised his tripe turned out to be true than Jack McCall ever was. Is it any surprise this movie was in cinematic limbo for four years? There really is no greater hell than sitting through an absolutely unfunny comedy with a crowd of people not even given a curtesy laugh.
And the absolutely worst movie I saw this year is...
1) BATTLESHIP: I got better story development playing the board game! Any kind of story is shoehorned in through blatent exposition info drops, the characters are all unlikeable and bland, there's product placement galore, and the motivations might make sense if I smash myself over the head repeatedly with a sledge hammer. I don't think I've ever seen the most basic laws of physics ever so brutally raped in a movie before. And then there's the design of the aliens! They look like the shaved cat aliens from Wing Commander with lizard eyes and porcupine quill beards. This was a movie that WANTED to be a Michael Bay style action flick with giant robots, too dumb to eat humans, and a long slow wet kiss on the mouth to the United States Military. Here's a simple question: How is this movie celebrating the United States Military when we are supposed to have this great emotional moment, when the protagonist of the movie learns humility, when in any rational world he would be court martialed for treason. HE GAVE COMMAND OF HIS SHIP TO A FOREIGN OFFICER? This movie is so bad the creators of this movie actually did interviews begging people to buy the DVD so they can waste more investor money... I mean make a sequel. This movie pissed me off so much that I believe I can comfortably boycott everyone who had anything to do with this. And I didn't even pay to see it!
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