“CHiPs”
As bad as “Baywatch” is, one thing that it firmly has in its favor is that it isn’t “CHiPs.” It’s another movie following that “21 Jump Street” template — irreverent red-band action-comedy attempting to revive a mothballed TV series. But where some of its target audience might have vaguely remembered “Baywatch,” “CHiPs,” the Erik Estrada show about the California Highway Patrol, aired a decade earlier than that, so it’s unclear who was meant to turn up to this thing unless it turned out to be brilliant. And in the hands of writer/director/star Dax Shepard, it’s decidedly less than that. He’s a genial enough presence, and it’s great to see Michael Pena in a lead role, but everything around them is sour, retrograde (it’s a film with a level of gay-panic homophobia that’s rarely been seen in recent years), slackly written, utterly generic and eminently forgettable.
“Sleepless”
Almost the precise definition of “airless American remake,” Baran bo Odar‘s “Sleepless” features a souped-up budget, a snazzed-up roster of stars (Jamie Foxx, Michelle Monaghan, Scoot McNairy, David Harbour, T.I., Dermot Mulroney, Gabrielle Union) and a slicked-up action-movie style, and all of it conspires to make it an enormously dulled-down version of the original French-language “Sleepless Night.” A single-location thriller that doesn’t even feel like a single location, because it’s set in a sprawling casino, complete with myriad hotel corridors, wellness spas and, sigh, a large underground carpark where things can unfold with maximum generic forgettability, its main claim to fame is that it rivals “Unforgettable” for the least apropos title for a 2017 film. Everything in it has happened so often before in so many other films including “Sleepless Night” that it’s quite possible to have a decent nap in the middle and miss absolutely nothing.
“The Promise” [our review]
You can’t fault “The Promise” for good intentions: financed entirely by the late Armenian-American billionaire Kirk Kerkorian, it was intended to draw attention to one of the worst atrocities of the 20th century, the genocide committed against the Armenian people by the Ottoman Empire that saw 1.5 million people killed in the 1910s and 1920s, something almost entirely overlooked by Hollywood. But as important as its subject is, the execution of Terry George’s film, which tells of a love-triangle between Armenian medical student Oscar Isaac, American journalist Christian Bale and French-raised Armenian woman Charlotte Le Bon, is remarkably inert. For all its lush production value (not done much credit by the digital photography), the storytelling is soapy, cliched and oddly unspecific, and the three fine leads have all been infinitely better elsewhere. There are worse films on this list, but few that squander their, well, promise, quite as badly.
“Power Rangers” [our review]
The good news, at least, was that “Power Rangers” wasn’t quite the grim-and-gritty reboot of the 90s cheapo kids’ TV favorite that the trailers had promised. The bad news is that it was still pretty terrible. In a world of infinite superhero and giant monster movies, there was hardly any need for a revival of this particular property. Occasionally, there’s a glimmer of what might have made it interesting: hints of grounded teen-movie issues, a surprisingly committed turn as a giant head by Bryan Cranston. But for 90% of its running time, it’s an ugly, nonsensical mess, torn between embracing the kid-friendly camp of the original series (something that Elizabeth Banks, in an almost literally scenery-chewing performance as villainess Rita Repulsa) and doing something more in line with the mythology of modern blockbusters, but sort of cancelling itself out in the process. The kids are mostly unappealing, the action badly directed, and the story somehow less interesting than your average episode of the original series.
“Fifty Shades Darker” [our review]
Two years ago “Fifty Shades of Grey,” based on the dumb lines of stupid words that EL James tauntingly sold as a “novel,” comfortably earned its slot on our Worst of 2015 list. But new director James Foley (sidenote: wtf happened to James Foley?) and the team behind the sequel seem to have wracked their brains to identify the first film’s few redeeming qualities and then strip them away, because “Fifty Shades Darker” is actually worse. Gone is whatever sparkiness Dakota Johnson brought to part one. And gone too is the emptily slick filmmaking which at least gave the story’s horrible materialism a kind of lifestyle-magazine gloss. Here, a visibly disengaged Johnson and a barely visible Jamie Dornan mope about entirely unremarkable, stock-photo locations, in dull costumes giving nothing to distract us from the disgustingly regressive politics of this supposedly transgressive story. And for all the breathy talk of S&M, the kinkiest this moronic tone-deaf wish-fufilment shitshow gets is in a couple of shower scenes: literally the cleanest sex you can have.
Dishonorable Unmentionables
“The Fate Of The Furious” is rubbish, but some of us kinda liked it (like our reviewer) so it got a pass. “The Circle” is very dull, but not quite down to the standards of this company; “Monster Trucks” — color us surprised — is overlong, dumb as paint and actually quite sweet; “A Cure for Wellness” is one of those ones that no one could be persuaded to write about again, even for a further pasting; we couldn’t force a single Playlisters anywhere across the globe to see “Smurfs: The Lost Village” because of the Geneva convention; Adam Sandler’s “Sandy Wexler” is pretty atrocious but that still means it nets out several degrees above most of his recent output and we don’t want to cause a relapse; “The Bye Bye Man” is by all accounts, including ours, awful but we forgot about it until now; and the same sort of goes for “Fist Fight” which also, nobody watched bar our reviewer. And finally, we see you “Assassins’ Creed” and we know what you’re at — releasing too late in 2016 to make it onto last year’s Worst lists, but also ruling yourself out of this one by not being a 2017 film. In this, if no other way, well played.
Let us know your own worst 2017 filmgoing experiences in the comments below.
