To coin an adage: Great films are universal, but bad films you endure alone.
Scouring the bottom is never a fun task. Not only did we have to watch a series of horrible movies, but now, at the end of the year, we critics have to recall, reminisce, and relive the pain of some of our most unpleasant movie experiences. And even though 2013 was a strong year for some great films (it was one of those years that had easily more amazing movies than a mere top ten list ordinarily demands), it didn’t make enduring some of these turkeys any less difficult.
All of these films are just awful. Some of them were assaults on the senses. Some of them were outright offensive. Some of them tromped all over beloved literature, and some were perhaps a bit too enthused about their real-life biopic subjects. Every one of them was a chore. Don’t let it ever be said that film critics have a cushy job. Just look at some of the entries below, and then ponder that we critics were required to see these movies. You, as an audience member, have a choice. You can read our reviews and then decide to see a film accordingly. We, however, are the martyrs who suffer through these bombs so you don’t have to.
True, some of the potentially worst films of the year did slide past me. Dario Argento’s Dracula 3-D escaped my attention (and yours), and I steered clear of The Smurfs 2. But consider this: I saw Battle of the Year 3-D, After Earth, Turbo, Movie 43, The Hangover Part III, The Host, Baggage Claim, Bad Grandpa, The Canyons, Machete Kills, A Haunted House, and R.I.P.D., and none of them made it into the bottom. Although any of those films may be considered to be in the “runner-up” category. There will be some recognizable blockbusters on here. Maybe some obscurities. But all will be painful.
Read William Bibbiani’s picks for The Worst Films of 2013.
Read Fred Topel’s picks for The Worst Films of 2013.
Witney Seibold is a featured contributor on the CraveOnline Film Channel, and co-host of The B-Movies Podcast. You can read his weekly articles Trolling, Free Film School and The Series Project, and follow him on “Twitter” at @WitneySeibold, where he is slowly losing his mind.
Witney Seibold Picks the 15 Worst Films of 2013
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15. Beautiful Creatures
Almost redeemable for its weirdness (Jeremy Irons in a silk robe trying really really hard to affect a Southern accent is really fun), but sogging deeply in bags of adolescent gland secretions, Beautiful Creatures was yet another Chosen One YA adaptation about a teen girl who might be the last Zion in a lineage of witches or something. Like all these films (Harry Potter included), its drowned in jargon and mythology, and doesn't bother to make anything that even resembles human behavior.
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14. The Internship
Not so much a comedy as an ad for Google.com, The Internship followed a pair of truly ancient salesmen (read: in their 40s) as they attempt to navigate the high-speed and highly competitive world of Google internships. The branding is bad enough, but the real-world depiction of Google's nightmarish candy-colored office prison makes the entire swirling business miasma feel like Hell. Also, it's not that funny.
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13. Pain & Gain
Like most of you, I have an enormous personal beef with action jockey Michael Bay, as he has insisted on closed-fisted pummeling me with film after film of witless, noisy stupidity. Pain & Gain is probably his best film, in that he attempted something that may have approached self-parody (it's about dumb body builders who attempt to commit a crime, and are only partly successful), had the film not been just as gloriously clunky and painful as many of his previous efforts. I appreciate that he aimed high, but that didn't make his movie very fun.
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12. Kick-Ass 2
A marked improvement over the original, but still possessed of the distinct disadvantage of having anything to do with the truly awful original at all, Kick-Ass 2 is once again torn between wanting to be brutally violent, but still slick and cool. It's a film about how violence can only lead to an endless cycle of revenge and pain, but also how much that violence, like, totally rocks. Plus there's an attempted rape scene that's played for laughs. Good job, guys. You made your would-be superhero flick into something morally irresponsible.
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11. (Tie) - Romeo & Juliet and The Great Gatsby
Two pieces of well-worn literature that I am pretty familiar with, both ripped apart by ambitious filmmakers. Perhaps I'm being a bit too much of a lit purist, but I cannot forgive screenwriter Julian Fellowes' choice to add dialogue to Shakespeare's tragic play. As for Baz “What Restraint?” Luhrmann's The Great Gatsby, it seems to have missed the point of the novel's condemnation of excess by giving us a film that celebrates it.
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10. Getaway
A stultifying and silly car chase movie that paired up the talented Ethan Hawke and the baby-faced Selena Gomez (both in some of the best films of the year) in a plot to undo an evil kidnapper's scheme, all from inside a speeding souped-up hot rod. What sounds like an excellent 90-minute B-movie on paper is a sloppy, murky, totally unbelievable mess. Also, Gomez hacks into a police mainframe using an iPad. Also, she sounds and looks like a 14-year-old cheerleader, whose recitation of lines like “Get out of my car” make you want to pinch her cheeks.
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9. Snitch
Getaway and Snitch are, in my mind, now the same movie. In both cases, I have to fight to remember that I even saw them. They are both sloppy and gritty, although Snitch does us one better by giving us a few bouts of sloppy moralizing. Dwayne Johnson plays a blue-collar father who, in order to exonerate his mostly-innocent son of drug charges, agrees to bust a drug dealer. Ponderous and not fun, Snitch was a forgettable and a chore at the same time.
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8. Scary Movie 5
Like you, I hate the recent wave of spoof movies. I was raised on classics like Airplane! and Top Secret!, so films like Scary Movie 5 feel like pale, childish imitators at best. These are billed as comedies, but whose jokes are all contingent of recognizing recent movies, rather than spoofing something that has it coming. I could eat a Mad Magazine and puke a better movie.
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7. The Lone Ranger
We all know about the clunky, over-bloated awfulness of this expensive misfire. Trying to make a rollicking western, Disney instead made a classic textbook example of studio meddling. This is a film that feels like it was made by a hundred people, all with conflicting ideas, all crammed into a single movie. It's too dark to be funny, and too goofy to be taken seriously. The Lone Ranger is a battle royale of eight screenplays all fighting for dominance. Also it's 2 ½ hours long. Also it wasted about $240 million.
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6. Star Trek Into Darkness
Not just a sloppy action film, but the worst in the long-running Trek franchise, Into Darkness openly ripped off so much of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan it began to feel like a humor-free spoof after a while. What's more, the previously peaceful and egalitarian ethos of “Star Trek” gave way to a clear-cut ultra-military, openly fascist celebration of might. The dumb secrets about Khan were unnecessary. The repetition of old lines of dialogue unforgivable.
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5. Saving Mr. Banks
I really really hated this film. Disney, in a severe case of revisionist history, tries to retell the real-life tale of P.L. Travers' fight to keep her personal Mary Poppins novels out of Walt Disney's clutches, for fear he turn them into, well, animated musical trifles. But, ultimately, it's Travers who has to lighten up, and just let the Disney magic rip her free from her stodgy old ways. This is a film that celebrates the triumph of the overdog, if you will. A polemic about how the Disney corporation can do better with an artists' work than the actual artist. About how great it is to love Big Brother. F*** you, Disney.
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4. Man of Steel
Zack Snyder, like Mr. Bay mentioned above, is an expert at overwrought, horrible-to-look-at action spectaculars that pummel you into your seat with gobs of sensory over-stimulation. His take on Superman was just as much an assault as his truly horrible Sucker Punch, only with the added bonus of taking a bright-faced and culturally optimistic comic book character, and turning him into a boring angsty teen with no character. Some people liked this film a lot, and I suppose there is tonal Superman precedent for Man of Steel lurking deep in within comic book canon somewhere, but this 9/11-baiting facial beating is kind of the opposite of what I picture when someone says “Superman movie.”
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3. The Counselor
What was anyone thinking with this dunderheaded pseudo-philosophical claptrap? Written by Cormac McCarthy and directed by Ridley Scott, The Counselor is some sort of turgid examination of immoral behavior, only without the benefit of human characters. It feels like a space alien read a bunch of Hobbes and Camus and tried to make a sitcom based on them. The film's one saving grace is a scene wherein Cameron Diaz, who is supposed to be a were-cheetah or something, rubs her vagina on a car windshield. Think about that. That's the good scene.
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2. (Tie) - Jobs and Salinger
Unabashedly self-serving films, both Jobs (a biopic about Steve Jobs) and Salinger (a documentary about J.D. Salinger) are both so breathlessly in love with their subjects, they seem to have missed the point. Jobs is a Randian examination about how Steve Jobs should never be questioned or challenged in his life, and had the moral right to abuse everyone in his path because, well, he would eventually invent the iPhone. Salinger, meanwhile, took a body of work devoted to attacking artifice and phoniness, and made the most maudlin and phony work imaginable. Salinger spins in his grave.
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1. Grown-Ups 2
Although not nearly as gross as his That's My Boy (which celebrated an abusive father), Adam Sandler's Grown-Ups 2 (his first sequel, surprisingly) is just as ugly. Unfunny and meandering, Grown-Ups 2 attempts to dole out a few hollow platitudes against bullying, but banks directly on the mockery of the weak an unusual. A masculine woman is mocked. A retarded character is physically abused. There is more pointing and laughing in this film than you perhaps experienced all through your youth. Sandler's penchant for comedy-through-abuse is getting uglier and uglier, and Grown-Ups 2 is just the latest example of his misguided and sadistic sensibilities.
