Who made the worst movie of the year?
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I’m going to be posting infrequently this week -- everyone’s entitled to a little holiday break -- but I couldn’t resist indulging in every moviegoers’ favorite ritual: toting up the worst movies of the year. I see so many movies each year that I treat the bad ones like way a baseball player handles the game where he struck out four times, the last time with the bases loaded: You forget about it and move on.
But Christian Toto, the Washington Times film critic, just posted a timely reminder of his least favorite films of the year, with his No. 1 pick going to ’88 Minutes,’ the horrifically bad Al Pacino thriller, which will surely be remembered more for the color of Pacino’s hair -- burnt orange -- than for its hapless filmmaking and inept acting. As Toto puts it: ‘If you’re not thinking ‘What were they thinking?’ during every scene of this misbegotten crime thriller, then your brain may not be connected to the rest of your body.’
Toto offers up a few other choice clunkers, including ‘Jumper,’ The Happening’ and ‘10,000 B.C.’ But everyone has their own taste when it comes to really awful films, so I’m eager to hear your worst film of the year choices. Just to get the ball rolling, here’s a few more candidates:
‘Meet the Spartans,’ an inane spoof (allegedly of ‘300,’ though who would know for sure) that got so many bad reviews it actually earned a two on Rotten Tomatoes, inspiring heaps of critical abuse (‘It’s so bad that even Carmen Electra should be embarrassed,’ wrote the Detroit News’ Adam Graham).
‘Meet Dave,’ a clunky one-note Eddie Murphy sci-fi comedy vehicle that inspired Empire magazine’s Simon Crook to write: ‘Avoid it like the plague.’
Spike Lee’s ‘Miracle at St. Anna,’ a soggy, interminable (2 hours and 40 minutes) drama about black World War II soldiers that might be Lee’s worst film ever, filled with every WW2 cliche known -- or as the Christian Science Monitor’s Peter Rainer put it: ‘Whatever miracle occurred at St. Anna never made it to the screen.’
And the dreadfully unfunny ‘Hamlet 2,’ which Focus Films inexplicably bought for $10 million after seeing it at Sundance, enhancing the festival’s reputation (remember ‘Happy Texas’?) as the burial ground for film comedy. The movie had so few comic moments that it inspired the New York Post’s Kyle Smith to write: ‘I laughed zero times at ‘Hamlet 2,’ which is aimed at campy men and the women who find them hysterical.’
I know there are lots of more possible deserving entries, from ‘Funny Games’ to ‘ Saw V’ to Will Smith’s ‘Seven Pounds,’ which is currently inspiring a wealth of critical venom. Surely I’ve forgotten a few groaners. Help me out here!