10. “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows” [Original Review]
Dave Green‘s rendition of the single most mystifying pop cultural phenomenon of our time finds almost everyone involved on strong form. The special effects team in particular do a whiz-bang job, and Green keeps the action sequences more fluid than series’ godfather Michael Bay is wont to do. The casting directors enact several coups, like getting Tyler Perry and Laura Linney (for whom one’s heart obviously breaks) to join regular offenders Will Arnett and Megan Fox. But all this attendant technical prowess only serves to highlight the fundamental fucking stupidity of a franchise based around four apparently teenaged yet ‘roided-out turtles named after Italian Renaissance painters trained by a sensei rat who fight New York City crime using their Spice Girl-style single characteristics (which are helpfully enumerated as strategy, instinct, logic and heart). The endeavor thus scuppered from the get-go, it’s hardly even a critique that the story is puerile and schematic, as baddie Shredder escapes custody and attempts to aid an abortive alien invasion, while the Turtles bicker internally about the possibility of turning human before learning Important Lessons about Accepting Who You Are and… yawn… is this thing over yet… Teamwork. TURTLE POWER.
9. “Gods Of Egypt” [Original Review]
You could argue that “Gods Of Egypt” marks a watershed moment: the point when audiences got so sick of whitewashing that they rejected wholesale a blockbuster premised as such being forced upon them. It’s a nice idea, but it’s more probable that “Gods Of Egypt” failed because it was completely dreadful, rather than because it was a film set in Egypt with a cast of Scotsmen, Danes and Australians. Once one of the most promising visualists in cinema with films like “Dark City,” Alex Proyas here delivers the story of a street urchin (the very boring Brenton Thwaites) who teams with deposed God Horus (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) to take down the malevolent Set (Gerard Butler). It’s a film that has everything: appropriation of ancient cultures and mythologies of “Clash Of The Titans,” production design of “Jupiter Ascending,” actors palpably struggling against green screens and lousy dialogue of “The Phantom Menace” (this has probably half a dozen of the worst performances you’ll see all year — step forward, Elodie Yung and Gerard Butler), and the boring hero’s journey bullshit of 90% of blockbusters. All it fails to have is one single redeeming feature. Oh, and it erases the identity of an entire people. It’s a good thing we won’t see the likes of “Gods Of Egypt” again, for more reasons than one.
8. “Dirty Grandpa” [Original Review]
Though Robert De Niro has more occasional highs these days than Al Pacino or John Travolta, for example, you still have a wealth of choices to choose from when seeking to pick out the absolute nadir of his career. At least, you did until the deeply undignified “Dirty Grandpa,” which is essentially a full-length movie version of the rapping-granny-who-says-fuck character that crops up in every terrible R-rated comedy movie released since “Old School.” Directed by “Borat” writer Dan Mazer with the same sourness he brought to his directorial debut “I Give It A Year,” this turkey sees Zac Efron’s uptight twentysomething forced into accompanying his recently widowed grandfather (played by De Niro and named, with a crushing sense of inevitability, Dick) to spring break in Daytona Beach. Efron and De Niro are game for more or less anything that Mazer can throw at them, but the trouble is that everything he throws at them is awful —it’s offensive without being truly transgressive and punches down while hedging its bets (De Niro defending a character from homophobic bullies doesn’t make up for the shittiness of his character elsewhere), and stinking of flop-sweat from the effort of trying to make you laugh. Which it doesn’t do.
7. “Divergent: Allegiant”
Some of you may have had a spare afternoon and read Veronica Roth‘s not-bad YA trilogy “Divergent.” You may also have watched the first two installments of the film series, which are passable in a “the-only-dvds-in-your-airbnb-when-a-coup-has-trapped-you-inside” sort of way. So you might have thought yourself fairly well-up on the Divergiverse, yet you’ll be completely at sea for most of the third film (directed by Robert Schwenke, veteran of the second installment). You will not be alone —just imagine how those less familiar with either the books or the preceding entries would feel. With the most memorable of its baddies already killed off and tepid villains taking their place (Jeff Daniels instead of Kate Winslet, and Johnny Weston instead of Jai Courtney —God help any film so poor that you start longing for the presence and charisma of Jai Courtney), the problems go beyond even the blandness of the characters who surround the valiantly floundering Shailene Woodley. Mainly, it’s that the story has by now become incomprehensible, pivoting so awkwardly off its original, fairly well-conceived axis that you may honestly spend the first half hour trying desperately to remember who all these people are and why they’re doing what they’re doing. You’ll also likely spend the last half hour actively forgetting everything all over again.
6. “Fifty Shades Of Black”
Proof, for any masochists who need it, that there is no property so self-parodic that it can’t be cannibalized for further mirthless lampooning by a Wayans brother, “Fifty Shades Of Black” is a spoof version of “Fifty Shades of Grey” given a side-splittingly hilarious African-American spin. So dead-eyed desperate for topicality that it uses “black lives matter!!” as a punchline delivered by billionaire Christian Black (Marlon Wayans) when his snooty mother (Jane Seymour) tazes his klutzy virginal paramour Hannah (Kali Hawk), that nadir marks merely the driest spot in this 93-minute laugh drought. Even the stunt casting falls flat, whether it’s Florence Henderson as Christian’s childhood piano teacher who initiated him into the world of dom/sub sexuality (via a heavy-handed series of “Whiplash” references), or Andrew “most followed person on Vine” Bachelor as Hannah’s “platonic” best friend who is not above roofie-ing her drink such is his unrequited lust, or comedian Jenny Zigrino‘s promiscuous-fat-white-girl-who-thinks-she’s-black. However, it does contain a sight more peen, albeit prosthetic/putty-based, than the Ken-doll-prudishness of the original. How impressive.
