10. “London Has Fallen”
Antoine Fuqua‘s 2013 “Olympus Has Fallen” was a horrible film/two-hour showreel for stab-wound special effects, but it did serve one minor purpose in that it made the similarly themed and also very stupid “White House Down” seem elegantly self-aware by comparison. Three years later, and the stabbings and blunt force trauma are back, but this time there’s no comparable Roland Emmerich vehicle for “London Has Fallen” to lumber around after: Now the ugly, rah-rah jingoism of the whole meatheaded endeavor stands before us, naked and probably priapic, amid the rubble of a once-great city but also who cares because Yurp. Directed this time by Babak Najafi, the film, like 2016 itself, is initially surprising but ultimately depressingly familiar in its barefaced racism — not just against the Middle Eastern terrorists who attack a state funeral, but also against almost every single other nationality represented, too, the better to make the ‘Muricans, led by grimacing knot of gristle Gerard Butler, seem efficient in facing down the brown-skinned threat. Armed with nothing but weapons, and the kind of wit that can slide the word “fuck” into any sentence for Wildean effect (“Go back to Fuckheadistan” is a line families will delight in for decades to come), Butler’s Banning seemed like a dinosaur in 2013, but now, as a charmless, unthinking, torture-justifying walking manifesto for the might-is-right brigade, he’s a man of our times.
9. “Sea Of Trees”
How bad must a movie be to be directed by Gus Van Sant, star the recently-on-a-hot-streak Matthew McConaughey, premiere in competition at Cannes, and still sit on a shelf for over a year before making just $20,000 in theaters? In the case of “Sea Of Trees,” extremely fucking bad. McConaughey stars as a grieving architect who travels to Japan’s suicide forest of Aokogihara at the base of Mount Fuji (also the setting for this year’s shitty Natalie Dormer-starring horror movie “The Forest,” a film that is nevertheless about fivefold better than this) with the intention of killing himself, only to find another man (Ken Watanabe) who has made a suicide attempt but has changed his mind and wants McConaughey’s help to get out. Their journey’s interspersed with various flashbacks to McConaughey’s troubeld marriage to Naomi Watts, who was an alcoholic, then was diagnosed with cancer. It’s pretty but ponderous in its early stages, then increasingly phony and cheap as it goes on, with no one ever behaving like an actual human being. And then it culminates in a couple of unfathomably stupid, cheap twists, *SPOILER* one guessable from minute one (Watanabe is a ghost!), the other surprising only in its cruelty (Watts recovered from cancer! But then her ambulance crashed on the way back from the hospital in front of her husband). The only reason this won’t live in infamy is because nobody saw it.
8. “Alice Through The Looking Glass”
Usually one expects a dip in quality with a sequel, especially when it comes from a different director from the original hit. But when the original film in question was 2010’s “Alice In Wonderland” which was maybe the worst film of that year and one of the ugliest in living memory, and marked the exact moment at which director Tim Burton sold his soul for a bunch of 3D pixels, a billion-dollar take and an overacting Johnny Depp in freaky make-up, you could have been forgiven for hoping the sequel would actually be better. But it isn’t. Chucking out the unnecessary Lewis Carroll stuff entirely, though retaining the title presumably just as a kick in the teeth, this farrago sees Alice (Mia Wasikowska) back in Wonderland and now traveling through time to save the Mad Hatter from deep depression, possibly caused by reading the script for “Alice Through The Looking Glass.” Johnny Depp, Helena Bonham Carter and Anne Hathaway all return and this time are joined by Sacha Baron Cohen‘s utter disinterest as Time, while in the director’s chair, proving that no one, not even the promising helmer of “Flight Of The Conchords” and “The Muppets,” is ever better than his material, James Bobin takes over from Burton and somehow, amazingly, manages to fall short.
7. “Suicide Squad”
It’s the hope that kills you. And what somehow made “Suicide Squad” worse is that we, despite the evidence, went in with hope. Yes, David Ayer is mostly not a very good director, and yes the marketing made it look like some kind of Insane Clown Posse tribute act, but it felt like it might at least be distinctive and, coming at the end of a crappy summer, maybe even vaguely entertaining. But in the end, we got a rotten mess, a movie that only proved to be slightly better than the other DC Comics movie this year just because of the incredibly low bar that Zack Snyder set. It’s a men-on-a-mission movie that spends so long introducing its characters that it fails to have any of the fun of the genre, a superhero movie without hope or wonder, an action movie where the action was incoherent and boring, a blockbuster that attempted to paper over its lack of brain or heart or anything by crashing a helicopter every time it didn’t know what else to do. It’s a grim, gaudy monstrosity that might have possibly brought fleeting happiness to a 14-year-old Slipknot fan in 1999, but appeals to virtually no one else. It’s a movie so bad that Jai Courtney is the best thing in it. And yet Warner Bros are so creatively bankrupt right now that we’re getting three sequels/spin-offs to it.
6. “Dirty Grandpa”
As an irascible patriarch in a David O. Russell movie, or, at a pinch, the ex-CIA agent dad in the “Meet The Parents,” Robert De Niro cast in a comedy role can work. But just because it can, doesn’t mean it will and it certainly doesn’t mean we should keep on trying it. He’d mostly avoided the all-out dreadfulness of some of Al Pacino‘s recent choices, but with the deeply undignified “Dirty Grandpa,” he seems to want to give his “Heat” co-star a run for his money in the how-low-can-your-late-career-go stakes. Directed by Dan Mazer with the same odd misanthropy on display in his directorial debut “I Give It A Year,” it sees Zac Efron’s uptight twentysomething forced into accompanying his recently widowed grandfather (De Niro) to Daytona Beach for spring break, with a high proportion of the film’s humor apparently to be derived from the unceasing profanity and the fact that De Niro’s character is named Dick. It’s all so desperately effortful (with Efron and De Niro almost heartbreakingly game for every dreadful degradation the script will heap on them), and the worst of it all is that all that effort yields scarcely a titter across the film’s feels-like-forever 102 minutes. If you hit yourself with a hammer hard enough to forget the legacy of Robert De Niro, you might be able to suffer through this, but otherwise you find yourself longing for the wit, wisdom and comparative lack of cringe of one of Rupert Pupkin’s stand-up sessions.
