Ahh...the year-end "Worst" list! This is my version of the Thanksgiving turkey - I wait all year for the chance to make one of these! Just one thing, I really don't have a formula for what lands on here. It's generally not just about being a bad movie. It's about also being disappointing, or if otherwise good resources were wasted, or if the film is intellectually-offensive on some level. Put another way, Madea's Christmas or Movie 43 aren't on here because you already know they s**. No-one was shocked or devastated by their s**ing, them s**ing doesn't matter so their s**itude doesn't feel like it makes much of an impact. And does anyone need me to tell them that Walter Mitty was a pile of a**? No. No, they don't.
Also, I am a human being, and as such, I experience near-constant growth and change both physically and intellectually. As such, my opinions occasionally change as I've had time to think about them. Therefore, you may find movies on this list described as "bad" that I had previously called "not that bad" or even "good", because I am a human being.
So, now then.
10. American Hustle
Eventually, every promising, next-grade American auteur filmmaker tries to make Goodfellas. David O. Russell...probably should've gotten his out of his system back when he was promising, and not just an undeniably-talented, but mercurial director who's starting to show signs of having peaked with The Fighter. It's not that this movie is bad so much as it's so average and lifeless, considering all the talent on hand. Why all the sturm und drang over something as goofy and ripe for comedy as the Abscam scandal? Why are four celebrated, immensely-talented actors (and also Bradley Cooper) stomping around with those god-awful fake New Jersey accents like an SNL sketch they forgot to bring the jokes for? It goes on forever, none of it feels authentic or interesting, there's a moment where an actor known for actual Martin Scorsese movies shows up, and it's like George Harrison just got up on stage with The Monkees. What a letdown.
9. After Earth
Will Smith and son in a heavy-handed self-indulgent science fiction allegory for...being Will Smith and son? Directed by the universal walking symbol for "who keeps hiring this man?" Does anything else need to be said? No! No it doesn't!
8. Star Trek: Into Darkness
There's a misconception that I hated the first Star Trek reboot. That's not true - I just didn't love it. I saw potential, I appreciated the effort, I enjoyed it strictly as a pretty decent action movie. And I still think that everyone in the cast who isn't Chris Pine could make a really excellent Star Trek movie, given the chance. But Into Darkness pretty much feels like all my worst fears about J.J. Abrams being just wrong for this franchise came true. The plot is a mess. The characters are all over the place. It fails to take the story or franchise in anything resembling an interesting direction, and it's all based around a pointless failure of a big twist that only exists exclusively for stupid mystery box marketing hype. The original reboot didn't s**, and that was a miracle, considering how bad it could have gone. But this movie squanders every scrap of good will the reboot built up. Is it too late to just forget this reboot universe and just pick up where we left off? Please? Patrick Stewart's still in pretty decent shape!
7. August: Osage County
Do you like otherwise good actors play a soap opera stable of dysfunctional family stock characters sitting around a table spitting out self-revelatory exposition that probably worked in the play, but slop out like some kind of Caucasian telenovela cheez whiz on screen, in heavily affected Pan-Midwestern accents while Her-Royal-Ham-ness Meryl Streep cackles out mechanically-telegraphed cutting remarks on cue like a gatling gun loaded with would-be Oscar clips? Have I got a movie for you! Or perhaps someone you hate, but have to take to a movie!
6. The Purge
Here's one of the most original premises for a suspense thriller in years - an annual holiday where for one night, everyone is allowed to do any evil, sick, depraved, degenerate, perverted, vile thing they want without fear of being arrested or even prevented...unforgivably wasted by a weak, witless movie that takes this great idea, and does nothing with it.
5. The Host
Was Stephanie Meyer over-criticised as a developing outsider artist of an author unfairly critiqued because of the early unforeseen mega-success of the Twilight saga? Nope! Turns out she just...s**s. I mean, The Host is so bad, Andrew Niccol couldn't make it good, and he made Gattaca!
4. Carrie
You can make a good movie out of anything. But if you're going to remake a cla**ic iconic movie, you'd better have a better idea than, "hey, let's make the same movie, only not anywhere near as narratively or visually memorable!" No-one has ever watched a movie and said, "This is good, but I'd like it if it were more bland and took fewer chances."
3. The Lone Ranger
Here's a picture of Johnny Depp as Tonto!
...
I got nothing else at this point, guys!
2. A Good Day To Die Hard
We always said Bruce Willis was so cool there's nothing he could do to become not cool. That's probably still true. But does he really have to keep trying?
1. Man of Steel
*GASP*
Alright, so...were there objectively worse movies than Man of Steel this year? Yes, we talked about this. But none of them were more infuriating, none of them were more disappointing against their own unrealised potential, and none of them stuck in my head and wouldn't leave the way this one did. At first, I was just disappointed but intrigued, but on each viewing and with each thought given it, the sheer weight of badness and miscalculation just gets harder and harder to take. So many good actors, such an accomplished and interesting creative team, and also for some reason, David Goyer. One of the most widely-seen, widely-known, widely understood, beloved iconic characters of all time - how did they get this so wrong that it just gets more wrong the more the memory just sits there and festers?
This was supposed to be the beginning of Warner Brothers' and DC Comics' answer to the Marvel Cinematic Universe, but it's more like an opposite inverse instead of a competitor. Mean-spirited instead of joyful. Ponderous instead of smart. Drab instead of vibrant. Grim instead of witty. Hundreds of thousands of individual creative decisions, almost all of them the wrong move at the wrong moment. Its failure is sad, but fascinatingly so. It's like an active crime scene of a movie. And even if the actual damage, when you get right down to it, mainly amounts to just one more mindless, uninspired action flick headed for the same heap as Transformers 2, The Expendables, The Mummy 3, et cetera...this is Superman, dammit. That's supposed to mean something. That supposed to mean you try harder.
And that's why, now that we've come to the finish line, Man of Steel feels like the most disappointing, most mishandled, worst movie of 2013. Here's hoping for a better one.
I'm Bob, and that's the big picture.