Before getting into our list proper, I want to give out a couple of
dishonourable mentions; these are films that, by all means, should be on this
list but only came out here in Australia on DVD, thus making them ineligible. First
off is Keith Lemon: The Film,
one of the worst ‘comedies’ I have ever seen. I should not be able to predict as many of the terrible jokes as I did with
this film. The other mention goes to The Starving Games, a
Seltzerberg parody film so lazy that I’m not even going to dignify it with any
real analysis.
And now, with those out of the way, time for the top 20
worst theatrically-released films of 2014:
#20: 300: Rise Of
An Empire
When the scene with the best acting in it is the sex scene,
something is seriously wrong with your movie. Aside from that, and one of the
best unintentional laughs of the year which I’m fairly certain was just me
laughing out of desperation at how the soldiers yelled out “Rocks!”, everything
about this film is done ineptly: The CGI blood looks fucking horrible, the male
lead is the store-brand knock-off of Leonidas with zero added charisma, the
writing reads like bad fanfiction complete with the lack of character restraint
that some of the more notorious works out there have, and the less said about
the tacked-on sequel baiting, the better. I’m glad I got to see Eva Green be
her psycho-sexual persona on screen again, but this film doesn’t do her any
favours.
#19: The Giver
As a big fan of the original book, I was definitely sceptical about this but it was actually working for me at first: Jeff Bridges
is great as the titular role and the additions made in the adaptation process
made sense in terms of stretching out the story. Unfortunately, once the third
act comes around, the enhancements made start to lose their grip: The Chief
Elder and Fiona, who get beefier roles in this version, open up massive plot
holes with their very presences in the story and the ending, which tries to
keep the same tone as the source material, makes no sense in context to
this film because of the changes made to
the story. Aside from the issues involving adaptation, the acting is extremely
weak for the most part especially from Jonas, Fiona and Asher, our central
characters. As much as I applaud Bridges for how hard he worked to get this
adaptation off the ground, I can’t help but feel that he has wasted his time if
this is all he has to show for it.
#18: Transcendence
For the one guy out there who watched The Eternal Mind
episode of Amazing Stories and thought that that episode wasn’t long enough and
featured too much characterisation, this film is perfect. For everyone else,
this completely fails to live up to its premise. Any attempts it makes to raise
questions about the nature of artificial intelligence are never fully fleshed out,
nor does the film even attempt to answer most of them. Given how one of the bigger
questions is whether or not Will as a personality still exists within the
machine, it is extremely poor in how they characterised him and the resolution
to that question feels tacked-on and rushed, despite the more than sufficient
running time. To make matters worse, the film is book-ended by a prologue that
spoils the ending and an epilogue that makes what happened in said ending
pointless. Will Pfister undoubtedly has a good eye for visuals and this film is
at least pretty to look at, but he should think twice before directing again.
#17: Deliver Us
From Evil
I have to admit, given how badly this film manages to come
together, it should be placed several spots further down the list, but the amount
of unintentional laughs I got from this movie bumped it up a few places. It feels
at times like it’s aware of how stupid it is, given how often it tries to be
funny at its own expense, but other times it genuinely wants the audience to
think that an exorcism scene where The Doors’ ‘Break On Through’ is playing is
terrifying and not hilariously out-of-place. Throughout the running time, the
amount of jump scares we get is ludicrous and, on occasion, rage-inducing. The
only legitimately good part of this film is Edgar Ramirez, who is not only the
best actor in this film but also gets the character that’s the best written as
well, making for one of the few things that had me engaged throughout. However,
with all that said, this is the only film on this list that I actually
recommend for readers to check out because this is one of those films that is
perfect for bad movie nights where you can get friends together to do your own
MST3K routine. Otherwise, deliver yourself from Eric's performance, among other things.
This is like if Hollywood thought that The Asylum was making
too much money with their mockbusters and decided to make their own: The
effects are cheap and sometimes even worse than some Asylum productions, the acting
is pretty much non-existent throughout with a pathetic male lead and some of
the most blatant ripping off of 300 I’ve seen yet.
#15: And So It
Goes
You know you’re in a classy film when it’s below an M rating
and it has a rape joke within the first five minutes. The writer seems to have
forgotten that, when you make a crotchety old man character, you need to at
least make him funny as all the jokes in this movie fall with a very audible
thud to the ground. The story is completely devoid of focus and aside from the
couple of scenes with Diane Keaton singing, there’s not much to give credit to
this movie for.
Admittedly decent actors let down by absolutely awful
material. The setting is painfully generic and feels like it was ripped
straight out of several other movies, the plot is not only idiotic but actually
is ripped right
out of another movie (Van Helsing), the characters constantly make dumb decisions
because the plot needs them to and the effects are among some of the worst this
year.
To contrast the previous pick, this has some of the
best effects work of the year.
Unfortunately, it is let down by incredibly stupid studio meddling to include
bad voice acting, insipid narration and an almost unbelievably juvenile script.
While the effects work should keep this off the list entirely, out of merit
that it shows more effort was put into this than almost every other entry here,
it makes it this far down the list purely because of how much of a colossal
screw-up this film became in comparison to how good it could have been.
95% dull, with little to no actual plot to speak of and
instead just meandering through its relatively short running time. Then it gets to
the ending and not only effectively wasted our time because how much of the
film wasn’t real, but also personally offended me because of its portrayal of
the male lead’s mental breakdown. It, for some reason, thought that this guy
going into a psychosis for two years was a
good
thing because it helped him build his confidence; I am kind of taken aback at
just how offensive this film became, given the incredibly bland majority of it.
The ending is just
that bad that it
alone warrants this film’s place on this list.
Being a bad adaptation is one thing; doing so while having
zero respect for your source material, while simultaneously trying to convince
your audience of how much better you are than previous adaptations, is
something else entirely. While the cast is mostly decent and there were a
couple of good musical ideas floating around in the production, the soundtrack
is bland pop garbage complete with Auto-Tune, which should be made illegal in
musical films, and any attempts to go into this film with an open mind and
ignoring the 1982 version are futile, considering how often this film tries to
be cute and poke fun at it itself. Rarely do I see a Hollywood film be this kind of pretentious.
While having a rather mouth-watering cast list, their
performances are only good within the context of a stage production; as a
film, it’s way too
over-the-top and melodramatic to take seriously. Not that I see the original
play being all that good anyway given this script, its need to make every
character unlikable and its abject failure at getting us to pity them when bad
things happen to them. I believe that this is meant to be a black comedy as much as I believe
that The Room was meant to be a black comedy.
#9: Planes: Fire
And Rescue
It’s hard to imagine a film being worse than the original
Planes but at least that film had a couple of interesting characters, even if
they were shoved to the side for most of it. This film has all of the problems
of the original: A script that thinks endless vehicle puns are the height of
comedy, a roster of stereotypes pretending to be characters, a plot that is
recycled from countless other movies, an arc for the main character that goes
nowhere, a setting that makes little sense given how its presented and
animation that is unbearably cheap-looking, especially for a
theatrically-released film. No joke, after watching both this and its
predecessor, I was so burnt out that I considered giving up on film watching
entirely; it’s
that bad.
#8: 22 Jump Street
After how much I enjoyed the first movie, I was hyped for
this one. What I ended up getting, however, was an overload of gay jokes and
innuendos and fewer deconstructive jokes that are just beaten into submission
until they are completely unsalvageable. The literal best joke in the film is
the end credits, where the writing is at its sharpest making fun of movie
sequels, but this has since gone flat after it was announced that 23 Jump
Street was indeed being made. Knowing that Lord and Miller, the same duo who
brought us the surprise juggernaut of The LEGO Movie, were behind this one is
very disheartening and I can only hope that this is a one-off in an otherwise
promising filmography.
#7: The Other
Woman
A watered-down version of She-Devil with Roseanne Barr, only
with three scorned women instead of one and no justification for why we should
root for them to win. Given how one of the three main characters, Leslie Mann’s
Kate, is characterized, it feels like this film was originally meant to be a
lot darker before it was rewritten, which sucks because it feels like whatever
movie
that would have been would at
least be better than this. This is all kinds of cringe-inducing, with some
pretty bad sexist jokes and some of the most clichéd music selections I’ve
seen in a long time; this is the kind of film to play the Mission: Impossible
theme unironically and think that it’s still a fresh joke.
#6: Into The Storm
Trying to give your found footage disaster film credibility
by including an environmental message, and roping in Hurricane Katrina to help
justify it, is pretty hackneyed and more than a little insulting but I’d be
thankful if that was the only thing wrong with this movie. The characters are
beyond clichéd and feel like they’re actively
trying to get themselves killed with how stupid they are; the
redneck comic relief is jarring and completely unnecessary; the found footage
aspect is warped and twisted to the point where they shouldn’t have even
bothered with it, with the shaky-cam making it so that we can’t see anything in
a lot of the shots, and the effects work is average at best. It’s rare that a
film will leave me with nothing good to say about it.
Even for a cheesy romance flick, this is horribly written.
Whatever themes of fate and love they were trying to convey are extremely
cookie-cutter and taken to rather ridiculous levels; the male lead is
wish-fulfillment personified without any attempt at hiding it; the editing is
shoddy and the ending is easily one of the most rage-inducing bits of fluff I've seen all year. This is a ‘chick flick’ in the worst possible sense of the term.
Even putting aside this film’s persecution complex that
makes GamerGate look rational by comparison, the writing here does a pretty
effective job at making everyone look bad, even its intended Christian
demographic: Atheists are complete monsters; Muslims are violent zealots; and
Christians are judgemental and self-righteous douchebags. Kevin Sorbo is the only
actor who seems to have any fucks to give about his performance and makes for
the most interesting part of the film, but even then he’s playing a completely
transparent straw man that will probably only serve to offend most Atheists and
be too over-the-top for most Christian audiences to take seriously… at least, I
hope that’s how they’ll see it because, quite frankly, thinking that this is
how Christians see non-Christians is kind of terrifying.
#3: Any Day Now
The only thing this film was missing was being set in Nazi
Germany for it to tick every single box for Oscar bait: A gay couple take in a
child with Down Syndrome after his drug addict mother goes to jail, the
mother believes that they are unfit to raise her son because of their sexuality
so they hire a black lawyer to defend them. However, it can’t even do Oscar
bait right since the writing keeps falling flat on its face. Every frame of
this film feels cold and calculated, designed to emotionally manipulate its
audience and while a lot of films are like this, it shouldn’t be this easy to
see through. Add to this an ending that exists for no other reason than for the
audience to feel sad, and the rather pathetic attempt to ground this film in
reality by saying it’s “based on actual events”, which is complete bullshit,
and not even Alan Cumming’s decent performance and singing can save this movie.
#2: Winter’s Tale
Hands down, the dumbest film of the year and easily one of
the dumbest of the last few years. The writing only has two modes: Nonsensical
and brain numbingly trite, with the writer clearly forgetting that, even in a
fantastical setting, there still needs to be a sense of logic in why things are
the way they are in-story. Instead, we get events happening out of nowhere with
no rhyme or reason, not to mention plot conveniences-a-plenty. Also, the
characters are all different varieties of badly drawn from the pretentious
Beverly who does nothing but spew Malick-esque platitudes to the moronic Pearly
whose plans to get the main character are the kind of thing that 50’s cartoons
were already making fun of. Aside from Will Smith as Lucifer, which I give
credit to for giving a well-done interpretation of the character, this film is
just a sink-hole of time, effort and any form of sense.
#1: Divergent
This may seem like a pretty odd pick for my worst film of
the year, especially given its competition, but here’s my reasoning: As bad as
every other film on this list is, as well as a few that didn’t make the cut, at
least they managed to convince me that their worlds existed. Their worlds would
be unfathomably stupid, but at least they did that well enough.
Divergent, on the other hand, has a premise and setting that are so flimsy that
I did not for one second buy into anything that I was seeing on screen. The
acting is definitely better than I was expecting, but the plot literally
requires for the characters the actors are playing to be one-dimensional
ciphers, showing how little this film understands about basic human nature and
good screenwriting. This is a film that fails at its concept and goes down from
there, and as a work of fiction that is unacceptable.
