Last week, I gave you the worst and/or most disappointing movies of 2014 numbers 20 through 11, and if you thought those were stinkers, you ain't seen nothing yet...or maybe you did - some of these were actually pretty successful, I don't know. Anyway...
10. Divergent
Here's a franchise so lazy and cookie-cutter even among the far-from-original young adult dystopia genre that I actually considered watching it again to make sure I wasn't accidentally thinking of scenes from The Maze Runner. Another hopelessly-generic failed future society-as-high-school-cafeteria hierarchy metaphor, it stars Shailene Woodley as the one special and unique teenage h**ne...YAAAAWN...who may be the only hope to destroy an allegorical caaaaaaste systemmmm which holds them in boooooondage...zzzzzzzz...oh, um, sorry...you get the idea.
9. Transcendence
Here's a science fiction film that doesn't seem to care much for science or filmmaking. Or its audience. Johnny Depp becomes a ghost in the machine and commits unspeakable acts on helpless victims. No, not the townspeople from the movie. The people in the theater.
8. American Sniper
Clint Eastwood fails (or maybe just chooses not) to find the dramatic through-line in the life of an American military hero. Unfocussed and weirdly cheap-looking, American Sniper meanders from one episodic setpiece to another without ever finding the core of the man it's supposed to depict. It's dull, dreary, and leaves its audience with no real insight into a decade of war, or the man it places at its center. In a late-year glut surprisingly dense with underwhelming Oscar-bait, this was the one I wanted to like the most, and was disappointed in to the same degree.
7. Robocop
There's no possible way that a neutered PG-13 cash-in remake of Robocop, one of the greatest sci-fi action films of all time, was going to be a good idea. But this remake is so stiflingly bad. Lifeless, directionless, overly-slick and representative of everything wrong with modern action movies and then some, it was kind of a marvel to behold. It's so thoroughly wrong-headed in such thuddingly-obvious ways, I almost want to imagine that it's a deliberate satire of itself. Then I remember that its a blasphemous remake of a movie that wrote the book on doing action movie satire right, and I just get sad again. This wasn't just a bad remake, this was pop-culture vandalism.
6. I Origins
Look, I get that being into obsolete stuff my grandparents were nostalgic for is a thing among indie scene brats these days. But I never imagined creationism would be one of them. In I Origins, one of the most embarra**ing Manic Pixie Dream Girl stock characters ever conjured breezes into the life of a scientist to teach him the error of his evolution-proving eyeball research by way of a moronic mystical plot twist that points us to one of the dumbest codas in pseudo-sci-fi history: Good news, kids! Science was wrong! There IS an intelligent designer after all! But don't worry, it's not that boring, judgmental one your parents and everybody back home was into. Nah, it's one of the cool Eastern ones that White hipsters can appropriate to mean whatever they want it to!
5. America: Imagine The World Without Her
This hilariously-self-serious propaganda piece masquerading as a documentary swirls the filmmakers' various political and ideological opponents into a cartoon conspiracy theory alleging a decades-old sinister plot by a shadowy cabal scheming to...uhhh...make Americans feel badly about...certain moments in their history...seems to be the scandal. Look, crap like this is a dime a dozen in an election year, but this one really stood out from the pack with its eye-popping xenophobia and the hatchet-job it performs on the American history it claims to educate about. It's the kind of bad movie where you look at it and say, "the guy who made this should have been arrested". And, funny enough, he WAS arrested! I mean, not for making this movie, he committed campaign finance fraud, but hey, still!
4. Winter's Tale
I'm not even gonna try and explain what happened here. I just can't. I just can't - you cannot be told what Winter's Tale is. You have to experience it for yourself. Just don't say I didn't warn you.
3. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles
Somehow, even though the actual source material is...what it is; even though there's a better version of this on TV right now, minimizing the impact of this thing; even though we all pretty much knew this was going to be awful, accepted it, processed it and dealt with it months ago, somehow this movie still managed to surprise with just how bad it really was. What stuck out the most was...how little actually stuck out. The film is so by-the-numbers, it feels like they shot the entire movie and THEN decided which characters they were going to matte in over the motion capture actors, as though with a few keystrokes this easily could have been the Street Sharks, or Wildcats, or Micronauts, and nothing else would need to change. Mostly, I feel bad for the current generation of young fans who deserved a better movie. I mean, I got one - why shouldn't they?
2. God's Not Dead
I want to be clear here - this movie is not on the list because I'm somehow ideologically-opposed to it. But hey, thanks for a**uming that anyway! No, this movie is on the list because it's terrible. That rare combination where a hateful, rancid premise is exactly matched by the ugliness, cynicism and ineptitude of its visible form. In telling the story of a bratty, self-righteous college student who debates a skeptical professor on the subject of faith, God's Not Dead can barely even be bothered to actually argue for itself, preferring to meander into side stories about how atheism will give you cancer, adherents to rival religions are child abusers, business success is a tool of Satan, and sage advice being doled out by a Christian rock band working a cameo as themselves. God never shows up to argue on his own behalf, by the way. This turns out to be the sort of movie that regards a guest spot by one of the fake rednecks from Duck Dynasty as a reasonable vessel for the good word. Not to belabour a gag, but this movie was holy sh**.
1. The Amazing Spider-Man 2
[plays clip of Tobey MacGuire dancing]
Remember when THAT was as bad as a Spider-Man movie could get? Yeah...those were the days...
[plays another clip of Tobey MacGuire dancing]
You know, on balance, there are probably movies on this list that hurt to watch more than The Amazing Spider-Man 2, but none of them so perfectly, horrifyingly encapsulate everything wrong and rotten about this moment in Hollywood filmmaking. A thuddingly-unnecessary superhero reboot of an even less necessary superhero reboot. Joylessly cranked out from the creative deadzone of the Sony corporation, it exists not to bring a cla**ic story to life, not to tell an exciting new story, not even just for fun; but for pa**ionless corporate brand management. Oh, and of COURSE its an Orci-and-Kurtzmann joint, to complete the awful, awful picture. Ah, my favourite superhero is the face of two of the worst superhero movies ever made. My new year's resolution? Try not to let that bother me so much.
I'm Bob, and welcome to 2015!