One of a film critic’s hardest tasks is whittling down a horde of quality films to a top ten/favorite fifteen/top twenty or whatever.
The opposite is true for the worst films of the year – it’s pretty easy to decide which collection of time wasters we wish we could have avoided (or mourn for the time lost).
This year there were an even dozen films that I would have just as well have done without (there were a few more than that, these were the ones that frosted me for specific reasons that were easy to discern).
13. Don’t Breathe (Screen Gems) – Beautifully constructed and equally beautifully performed, Don’t Breathe lurches into two wrong turns one after another at about the beginning of the third and pulls a sharp U-turn from brilliant to appalling in a heartbeat. The home invasion gone wrong plot would have worked brilliantly without either. Pity.
12. The Girl on the Train (Universal) – There is (almost) nothing worse than a really well made film that gives its audience absolutely no reason for caring. Here there’s a cleverly constructed mystery/puzzle and the film is beautifully made – but there isn’t a single character worth caring about, and none are even worse getting upset about. The result is a film that is, despite its pluses, completely uninvolving.
11. X-Men: Apocalypse (20th Century Fox) – Where its immediate predecessor was convoluted in a necessary, positive way, XMA was exactly the opposite. Plus, when a villain can turn living beings to ash with a thought, why go to all the trouble of creating a Rube Goldberg device with plenty of ways to go wrong to kill them? Plus, there was no rhyme or reason to why Apocalypse picked the mutants he chose to enhance as his aides (and they really didn’t do much to boot…).
10. Inferno (Columbia Pictures) – Unnecessarily convoluted, ploddingly developed and performed with less than enthralling conviction, Inferno is just a lazy sequel that was just too little, far too late.
9. Alice Through The Looking Glass (Walt Disney Studios) – Boring, tedious, unfocused and with paper thin characters, this sequel to Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland lacks the wit, whimsy and panache of the original in a thin, undeveloped plot that’s stretched for too thin for far too long. No wonder Burton wanted nothing to do with it.
8. The Divergent Series: Allegiant (Summit Entertainment) – The sequel to the better than average first two instalments lacked even the few breaths of originality present in parts one and – and spent, essentially, its entire running time spinning its wheels to set the stage for a finale that may never happen thanks to the decision to stretch the YA trilogy of novels into four movies.
7. The Light Between Oceans (Touchstone Pictures) – paint-by-numbers quasi-Nicholas Sparks. Virtually sedentary pacing, incredibly contrived plot and ho-hum performances nearly put me to sleep (and since I’ve never been able to sleep sitting up, that’s pretty bad).
6. The 5th Wave (Columbia Pictures) – Yet another YA adaptation that really added nothing significantly new to the genre. So utterly predictable that even a decent lead performance by Chloë Grace Moretz couldn’t keep it from being boring. Even the visual effects seemed sleepy.
5. The Neon Demon (Amazon Studios) – Nicholas Refn Winding’s attempt at an intellectual horror film looks great but really doesn’t go anywhere. It’s a total waste of an incredible cast (including Elle Fanning, Keanu Reeves, Christina Hendricks and Jena Malone). Looks great, though.
4. Collateral Beauty (Warner Bros. Pictures) – Uses the death of a child as an obstacle to a corporate problem. Awkwardly tries to deal with grief and uses a clever concept (personifications of Love, Time and Death talk to a bereaved father to shake him out of his depression) mawkishly. The most interesting character in the film is a middle-aged female PI who’s onscreen for less than five minutes.
Winner of the coveted ‘Most Cynical A-List Film of 2016.’
L-R: Kate McKinnon as Mary Winetoss, Jason Bateman as Josh Parker, T.J. Miller as Clay Vanstone, Olivia Munn as Tracey Hughes in OFFICE CHRISTMAS PARTY by Paramount Pictures, DreamWorks Pictures, and Reliance Entertainment
3. Office Christmas Party (Paramount Pictures) – All the best bits are in the trailer. The rest is uninspired gags we’ve seen a million times before. Witless. Makes last year’s The Night Before, a moderately successful R-rated Christmas flick, look positively inspired.
2. Assassin’s Creed (20th Century Fox) – Oscar®-worthy cast; Razzie®-worthy movie. I’ve never played the game but if it’s anything like the movie, I wouldn’t even consider trying it.
1. Gods of Egypt (Summit Entertainment) – Two Egyptian gods (played by a couple of sorta tanned white guys) battle for to rule (or not) Egypt. Meant to be an epic adventure, this movie plays like a bad video game. The dialogue is crap, the pacing is all over the place and the CGI look twenty years old. The filmmakers clearly equate loud with good. They are wrong.
Winner of the ‘I wish Ray Harryhausen Was Still Alive and Working Award’ for 2016.
Not Quite Scraping Bottom: Lights Out – which quickly and efficiently sets up its plot and lays out its rules – then promptly breaks them before the movie is even half over.