5. “The Snowman”
Has anyone checked in on Tomas Alfredson lately? Not just to see that he’s okay following the (well-merited) critical and commercial drubbing of his Jo Nesbø adaptation, but also because we still can’t shake the feeling that the director of “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy” and “Let The Right One In” must have been tied up in a basement somewhere while an imposter shot this bafflingly awful film. Pending the discovery of a complex director-kidnapping plot — which is actually more believable than anything that happens in “The Snowman” — we have to lay a lot of the blame for the multiple failures of this needlessly overcomplicated yet nonetheless extraordinarily boring misfire at Alfredson’s door. The rhythmless, jagged, time-hopping editing; the blurry performances from usually reliable actors like Michael Fassbender, Rebecca Ferguson and a bizarrely underused Toby Jones; the frankly WTF aspects like Chloe Sevigny playing twin sisters for absolutely no discernible reason and whatever the hell it is that Val Kilmer is doing: This is the rare film in which absolutely nothing works. Which in retrospect, seems inevitable given that it’s about the year’s most easily guessable serial killer, whose calling card is a freaking snowman left at the scene, and for which the marketing was pure trash. Mister Viewer, You Should Have Known This Would Be Shite, I Gave You All The Clues.
4. “Home Again”
There are a lot of bad films on this list. But if, on pain of torture, you were to force me to rewatch them all one by one, it’s this Hallie Meyers-Shyer romcom that would have me gladly proffering my nails to your slivers of bamboo instead. This is doubtless a matter of taste, but the mindnumbing vacuity of this cinematic scented candle is more offensive than the active, semi-awe-inspiring badness of so much else here: by the time we get to Reese Witherspoon weeping in her well-appointed bathroom because the preppy lovestruck toyboy (lanky Pinocchio Pico Alexander) she’s known for about 5 minutes has been too busy schmoozing the producer of his first feature to make it to a casual dinner party, we understand that this film is not actually set in LA, but in Lalaland. Which is maybe appropriate considering the only way to spend time with people this overweeningly privileged and self-involved is to take writer Orla Smith’s advice and imagine it all as a stealth exposé of the making of Damian Chazelle‘s “Whiplash.” Even then, it’s so bland it’s hard to keep your eyes from sliding off the screen in search of something with more personality, like pocket lint. It does, however, serve one important purpose — if escapism is what you’re after and you end up in this pastel table-dressing dystopia of apocalyptic Cali-wholesomeness, you will want to turn around and fling yourself, sobbing with gratitude, back into the arms of the real world. However shit it is, it’s not “Home Again.”
3. “The Book of Henry”
Breathtakingly ill-judged! A jaw-dropping miscalculation! If negative reviews could be used as marketing tools, the poster for Colin Trevorrow‘s staggeringly, somehow confidently inept “The Book of Henry” would be slathered in superlatives. The truly bizarre tale of a genius kid (Jaeden Lieberher) whose dying wish is that his waitress mom (Naomi Watts) murders their next-door neighbor whom he suspects of abusing his stepdaughter, the craziest part of all is how everyone involved, including Trevorrow, seems to be going through the motions of this motion picture like it’s a perfectly normal movie. But as the weepy terminal-illness portion gives way to the dumbfounding thriller thing about halfway through it’s clear we are in an unmapped territory of event-horizon tonal inconsistency. Out here, it seems like a good idea to cross-cut between a little black girl singing “Amazing Grace” at a school talent show, and a pragmatic single mom assembling a sniper rifle per the instructions relayed by a recording of her dead kid, and to have a chronically disbelieving school principal suddenly understand the truth of an allegation of child abuse through the medium of the young victim’s ballet routine. Much the way she didn’t believe the kid was being molested until she saw her dance it, you won’t believe the mess made of “The Book of Henry” until you watch it with your own two eyes.
2. “The Last Face”
“Dreams are not luxuries any more than refugees are not like us” is part of a speech uttered by Charlize Theron at the climax of Sean Penn‘s humanitarian disaster “The Last Face.” In the context of the film, it’s such a moving observation that it causes the assembled tuxedoed philanthropists to leap to their feet in a flurry of checkbooks. In the context of being a real person witnessing this gruesome debacle, it is just incomprehensible, yet still unmistakably condescending, lazy-ass writing. Poor Theron turns in one of the worst performances of the year as the stricken white savior with daddy issues who goes to Sierra Leone and falls in anguished love with Javier Bardem‘s hunky frontlines doctor. The blood and violence is unsparingly depicted in disturbing scenes of child suicide, piles of fly-ridden corpses and a dead man with his intestines roped across a road like a barrier. But it is merely a cue for more whispering, self-involved narration, and a backdrop to the tale of amour fou — often literally as in a telling coda in which the attractive movie stars embrace doomedly in the foreground while the black Africans around them fall out of focus until they’re one indistinguishable mass of background suffering. Like they’d know anything about suffering compared to these two tormentedly committed do-gooders! Not content with documenting the previously unknown aphrodisiac potential of genocide, Penn commits a few war crimes of his own, not least the insistent overuse of The Red Hot Chilli Peppers on the soundtrack. “How long, how looooooong…” warbles Anthony Kiedis over an awful sex scene, and the answer here is “forever.” Not only is this monument to self-importance a perfect example of everything for which conservatives have ever slandered liberals, its two hours go on for centuries, meaning it actually ends up feeling longer than the entire history of man’s inhumanity to man.
1. “The Emoji Movie”
Is it shooting fish in a barrel to put “The Emoji Movie,” a film for children that had no aspirations at any point in its creation other than to milk money out of those children’s parents, so high on this list? Perhaps. But in this case, the fish in the barrel are savage fucking piranhas that would devour everything you loved if they remain un-shot. Even by the low expectations set by the premise of a film literally about the personifications of the cartoon faces that you send on your phone because words take too long to type, “The Emoji Movie” is a gaspingly cynical, utterly hollow piece of work, made all the worse because “The Lego Movie” (a film worsened by the fact that it evidently made this one possible) and even goddamn “Angry Birds” (a film somehow improved by how totally awful this is) proved that you didn’t have to be so craven in doing something like this. Transparently ripping off a bunch of recent animated hits (most notably “Wreck It Ralph”), it creates an inside-the-phone universe without internal coherence, good jokes or joy, filled instead with endless product placement and, what’s worse, the voice of James Corden. In a year that ultimately proved to be a great one for film, this was the only movie that genuinely made us fear for the future of the medium. [gun] [head] [coffin].
We do this list twice a year and at the halfway point (which you can check out here if you fancy) there were quite a few films whose awfulness has been supplanted in our minds by now. But suffice to say, it was only a bone-deep weariness and often point-blank refusal to revisit that kept the likes of “King Arthur: Legend of the Sword,” “Sleepless,” “Underworld: Blood Wars,” “Resident Evil: The Final Chapter” “Rings,” “The Space Between Us,” “The Great Wall,” “The Belko Experiment,” “Power Rangers,” “Ghost In The Shell,” “The Promise,” “War Machine,” “XXX: Return of Xander Cage” and “Rupture” from recurring on the year-end list.
And there have been plenty of newer titles that nearly took a Slot of Shame: Risible sci fi flick “What Happened to Monday”; risible arthouse flick “Woodshock“; risible robot flick “Transformers: The Last Knight“; risible Adam Sandler flick “Sandy Wexler“; risible Cannes non-starter “From the Land of the Moon“; risible techno-horror “Friend Request“; risible non-techno horror “Bye Bye Man“; risible kidnapping flick “Kidnap“; and risible biopic “Goodbye Christopher Robin” among them. Sadly, or happily depending on how you look at it, none of us saw “Just Getting Started” with Morgan Freeman and Tommy Lee Jones, and while one can never judge in advance, also we totally can and are happy to assert it would have made it onto this list if only anyone had dragged themselves to it. Neither has anyone seen “The Greatest Showman” yet, dunno why that popped into my head, probably would have no bearing. But speaking of likely disasters, we were genuinely hoping by now someone would have watched the Max Landis-scripted, David Ayer-directed, Will Smith-starring Orc-cop caper “Bright” but the screenings are happening tonight which, well, I guess we have to say well played, Netflix, well played.
Leap to the defense of whichever masterpiece we’ve bull-headedly misunderstood in the comments, but try to keep it original eh? Maybe take a bullet for the likes of “The Emoji Movie” or “The Book Of Henry,” for once and not “Justice League” or “Atomic Blonde” which we already know some people like. Or don’t. Whatever, really. Have at it. This feature hasn’t killed us so it’s only made us stronger. And I, for one, have now watched “The Last Face” and survived: what can you possibly do to hurt me?
— with Rodrigo Perez and Kevin Jagernauth