5. “X-Men: Apocalypse” [Original Review]
There’s something frustratingly inconsistent about the ‘X-Men‘ movies. There have been good ones, particularly Bryan Singer’s “X2,” and to a lesser extent the more recent “Days Of Future Past,” but while Marvel has successfully replicated its own formula with a certain amount of regularity, you never know when the next shitty X-Film will arrive, and arrive it certainly did with “X-Men: Apocalypse.” Set in the 1980s (though the disregard for any form of continuity that this franchise holds means it might as well be set anytime), it sees Professor X (James McAvoy) and Mystique (Jennifer Lawrence) recruiting new allies to tackle the god-like mutant Apocalypse (Oscar Isaac, who it turns out is capable of giving a bad performance) who’s recruited Magneto (Michael Fassbender) to his cause. With Nicholas Hoult, Rose Byrne and Tye Sheridan joining McAvoy, Lawrence, Isaac and Fassbender, this hot mess comes across principally as one of the biggest wastes of talent since Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and The Big Bopper got on a plane. There’s no meat here, no theme or story or character or consequences (Fassbender walks away scot-free at the end having committed genocide), only a parade of joyless, expensive bullshit that made us tired of superhero movies almost as soon as ‘Civil War’ had re-energized us about them again.
4. “The Do-Over” [Original Review]
To some, Adam Sandler would seem to have the perfect career: despite his box office draw being palpably on the wane in the last few years thanks to flops like “Blended” and “Pixels,” the comedy star got a huge sum for a four-movie deal with Netflix that gave him complete creative freedom. And yet to watch “The Do-Over,” the second film as such and Sandler’s first R-rated action-comedy since 1996’s “Bulletproof,” is to look into the eyes of a man who has everything and yet still seems deeply, clinically depressed and is taking no joy in the lack of constraints. Steven Brill’s film stars David Spade (Sandler is nothing if not loyal to his old pals) playing a middle-aged accountant in a rut who goes to his high-school reunion and meets his one-time bestie (Sandler), who ends up faking both their deaths and embroiling them in a criminal conspiracy. It’s to some degree from the same wish-fulfillment milieu as the “Grown Ups” films, with Sandler and Spade getting to spend time in sunny Puerto Rico, where every attractive woman they pass immediately tries to blow them, or kill them, or both (it’s one of the most staggeringly anti-woman films in recent memory). But it also tries and fails to be a thriller, full of sloppy plotting, crappy action sequences and, perhaps inevitably, Nick Swardson. It’s almost reason to delete your Netflix account.
3. “Alice Through The Looking Glass” [Original Review]
Tim Burton’s 2010 “Alice In Wonderland” was a real shitshow: the worst film by the director, perhaps the worst film to make a billion dollars, the nadir of the current fairy tale revival, and one of the ugliest films in living memory, its gaudy green-screen aesthetic coming across like someone puked all over a Nintendo 64 platform game. But in light of the able “Flight Of The Conchords” and “The Muppets” helmer James Bobin taking over from Burton, we hoped that if a sequel had to happen (and as the disastrous box office receipts have proven, it really didn’t) that it might be an improvement. But the follow-up, which departs entirely from Lewis Carroll for a plot that sees Alice (Mia Wasikowska) returning to her fantasy friends and traveling through time to save the Mad Hatter from deep depression, is anything but. Returning, presumably just because they were under contractual obligation, to Johnny Depp, Helena Bonham-Carter and Anne Hathaway’s characters (plus various interchangeable CGI beasties) and introducing a never-more-bored Sacha Baron Cohen as Time, the film lumbers from set piece to set piece with none of the wit and spark of its source material, forcing, like its predecessor, a deeply weird bit of material into an utterly conventional shape.
2. “Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice” [Original Review]
There is a certain degree of relativism that goes on in the selection of a list like this, in which you have to judge the extent of a film’s badness against the scope of its ambition: a tacky cheapo spoof might be a worse time at the movies than a lackluster tentpole, but the expense and bombast of the would-be blockbuster amounts to a yawning chasm-style disparity between expectation and delivery. But then comes Zack Snyder‘s “Batman v Superman” and you don’t have to worry about issues like that at all: it is massively ambitious, intensely self-serious and also extremely shitty, all on its own terms. The disjointed storytelling, incoherent characterization, stupid plot twists and awful performances (Gal Gadot is ok, Ben Affleck almost passes muster, but everyone else needs to have a long hard think about what they’ve done) amount to a thundering disdain for the intelligence of the audience that would be unforgivable in a film that cost a tenth of its budget. But botching a can’t-miss premise despite your seemingly limitless resources, and then slathering it all in fun-suck pomposity and self-importance is not just a missed opportunity, but it’s actively galling, moving the dial from “disappointing” or “underwhelming” to “Oh God oh God, will it never end?”
1. “Mother’s Day” [Original Review]
There is both humor and charm in Garry Marshall’s latest greeting-card-inspired ensemble comedy, and both happen over the end credits. The humor appears in a blooper outtake when Julia Roberts breaks character as the frighteningly coiffed TV jewelry shill Miranda to deliver a perfectly timed ad-lib. And the single dose of charm comes a couple of bloopers later, when Jennifer Aniston (who obviously murdered Gandhi or something in a previous life to be saddled with this humiliating a role) accidentally calls Roberts’ character “Julia” and everyone laughs. In fact, possibly because no one’s cracked a smile in weeks of shooting, they all laugh way too long and heartily at what is a fairly unremarkable slip of the tongue, but this one moment still has more truth and warmth in it than the entire rest of this benighted farrago. Featuring Kate Hudson, Jennifer Garner, Britt Robertson, Margo Martindale, Timothy Olyphant, Sarah Chalke and Aasif Mandvi, all of whom should know better, this turd also boasts Jason Sudeikis and Brit comedian Jack Whitehall, who maybe shouldn’t, but you wish they did anyway. That a film from an 80 year-old white guy could be so casually, institutionally racist and so proudly unhip that “tweet at me” is a thing that is both said seriously and then held up as an example of “this wacky modern world, eh?” is depressing, yet perhaps not shocking. That a movie called “Mother’s Day,” featuring a veritable who’s-who of one-time A-list females all just one heartbeat away from their renaissance roles, should be so blitheringly, mindlessly, inanely sexist is actually over-the-line offensive. Suggesting that no one involved is, intends to be or indeed has ever met a mother, it’s dangerous to be hyperbolic at the halfway point of the year, but “Mother’s Day” may not be just the worst film of 2016 so far. Around the time that insufferable widower Sudeikis, clad in pink pants and loud shirt, starts to karaoke-rap in memory of his dead soldier wife, you could be forgiven for wondering if it’s worst wide-release movie ever made.
We wish we could say that this list encompasses every bad film released this year, but that’s unfortunately not the case. Also in consideration were Michael Bay’s jingoistic “13 Hours,” William Monahan’s nonsensical “Mojave,” rightly-long-delayed Natalie Portman western “Jane Got A Gun,” the cynical “Pride & Prejudice & Zombies,” Emma Watson low-point “Regression,” the deeply disappointing “Triple 9,” YA sci-fi “The 5th Wave,” and racist actioner “London Has Fallen.”
There was also Sacha Baron Cohen’s clunky action-comedy “The Brothers Grimsby,” mirthless Sundance comedy “The Bronze,” Anthony Hopkins and Al Pacino sadly united for “Misconduct,” Julia Stiles and Anthony Hopkins in the awful “Blackway,” Kevin Costner in thriller “Criminal,” pointless Lance Armstrong biopic “The Program,” Jake Gyllenhaal in the generic “Demolition,” Anna Kendrick and Sam Rockwell being unable to save “Mr. Right,” the instantly forgettable and utterly pointless “The Huntsman: Winter’s War,” and the deeply bad (though not quite bad enough for the list) “Warcraft.”
Anything else? Let us know what you hated most in the comments.
