Just missed the cut... Priest (Karl Urban's mugging at least made it interesting), Apollo 18 (not quite as annoying as the Paranormal Activity franchise), The Darkest Hour (effort was put into the visuals and at least it was short), Abduction (take out Taylor Lautner's charismatic abyss and this could have decent), and Anonymous (really good idea for a movie with entirely the wrong production/creative team... somehow the guys behind 2012 and Day After Tomorrow don't really work for a historical epic)
7. Sanctum 3D
James Cameron's name was slapped all over this release and the subject matter (adventure underwater) certainly fit the shoe as well as "in 3D"... However, Cameron's role was only as an executive producer and the actual film is an Australian production. I was hoping for something akin to the first half of my personal favorite "The Descent". However, for a movie about an underwater caving expedition gone extremely wrong, this movie is actually amazingly boring and unmemorable. The script plays completely to cliches (pretty easy to figure out who the "red shirts" are and who the "final guy" will be. Ioan Gruffuld, the "star" of the Fantastic Four movies, is hamming it up and everyone else looks cold and tired, even Richard Roxburgh as the main diver (he ably chewed up the scenery in Moulin Rouge and Van Helsing). There are no compelling characters and although the diving sequences are technically impressive, I feel like after The Descent and even the Cave that there wasn't a lot of places for this movie to go. Just a soggy mess...6. Trespass
Nick Cage and Nicole Kidman in a Joel Schumacher movie, well, it could be bad... but this is a miserable. Now there are some good "home invasion" movies... Panic Room the obvious choice, but also the gritty and unsettling Kidnapped and even the snark and honest brutality of Funny Games. Unfortunately, besides some Cage mugging, this is a 91 minute running time that feels like 3 hours. The home invaders are the usual stock group... we've got the hunk with a heart of gold, the drugged up stripper girlfriend, and the evvilll muscle who there's to harm, rape, and intimidate. This film gained notoriety when Cage demanded part way through shooting that he switch parts from the beleaguered husband to the lead kidnapped. The ensuing delay got this movie dumped in mid October with a small release and only made 9 M against a 35 M budget. Now if Cage had played both parts Adaptation style it might have been interesting but with a bored Kidman and a completely miscast Cam Gigandet as the lead kidnapper we only have a sloppy mess. Add in a convoluted script with a bunch of almost ludicrous plot twists and its easily amongst the worst of the year... However, they were at least trying for something different and Cage has an entertaining freakout, so its not as bad as...5. Real Steel
I have a tough time rating this movie because its one of the best and worst movies I saw last year. I mean, I'm not sure what I expected out of a big budget "Rock Em, Sock Em Robots" or Transformers meets Rocky type movie. In all honesty, the CGI robots looked amazing and the direction and editing are coherent enough to let you see the fights pretty clearly. So what was awful about this movie? Well, Hugh Jackman seemed extremely miscast as maybe the most deadbeat of dads in a movie like this. One of the early plot points involves Jackman's character trying to sell his son for $100,000.00 to buy more robots after his wife passes away. This may have worked in a dark comedy, but seems very out of place in a movie like this. Shaun Levy, best known for directing the Night at the Museum franchise, can handle visual effects but the ham handed scriptl. Its easy to see where this awful script came from.Tangent - The other screenplays by writer John Gatins have been Summer Catch (Freddie Prinze Jr is an underdog prospect trying to make the majors), Hardball (the Bad News Innercity Bears with Keanu Reeves), Coach Carter (Sam Jackson coaches an underdog basketball team), and Dreamer (Kurt Russell, Dakota Fanning, and an underdog racehorse). Amazingly, Gatins also wrote the excellent Flight (up for 2013 Best Screenplay!?!).
Back to Real Steel, between the phoned in Jackman acting, the wasted supporting characters (why was Anthony Mackie in this movie?), and a slightly older Phantom Menace era Jake Lloyd clone (Dakota Goyo). I mean, one could argue that the movie is aimed more at children but Jackman's unscrupulous loser doesn't seem like he belongs in that sort of movie either. Kids don't care about story elements or narrative and only about robots beating each other up. I'm not a kid and I considered Real Steel to be as big a failure as the Transformers franchise it tries to emulate and cash in on.
4. Shark Night 3D
Seven college students plus two bayou rednecks plus scores of sharks plus 3-D add up to simply awful in Shark Night. This is a movie that I had great hopes for, David R. Ellis (recently deceased) delivered with the entertaining Snakes on a Plane and several decent Final Destination sequels. Piranha 3D was one of my favorite releases of 2010. Instead, we get a heartless, suspense-free 90 minutes of sharks dining out on kids stuck on an island in a Louisiana lake. The problem is, instead of Samuel L. Jackson, we're stuck with the dorky scientist from Avatar (Joel David Moore), Katherine McPhee playing herself with tattoos, and the oddly detached Sara Paxton. So with little urgency in the editing/pacing (this movie feels long) and no really interesting characters, we get some good nudity and gore, right??
Nope, because for some reason, Shark Night 3D was released as PG-13 and this ratings limitation completely destroys and undermines the movie. Sharks seem to eat most people whole, there are plenty of bikinis but no nudity, and even a character losing a limb has little impact.
Now, I saw this in 2D and I could tell that if seen in 3D, yeah, stuff flies at the
camera, the appropriate viscera and jaws and boat parts. To its credit, there's a fairly decent action sequence involving a boat wreck in the first act. The underwater
photography is pretty, but even the dread that hangs over the movie's
every aquatic moment feels watered down. The movie lacks jolts, pathos or glee when this deserving character or
that undeserving one becomes a shark snack. There's even a fairly odd plot twist towards the end that seems more ridiculous and silly rather than suspenseful. Just an awful, terrible time but I did learn my lesson, never to jet ski through shark infested waters.
This trailer looked like a Saturday Night Live sketch, I mean, the premise is that Adam Sandler plays both twins Jack and Jill. Jack is similar to
roles we’ve seen him play before (like in Click or Grown Ups where he's playing the "straight" character), but Jill is obnoxious and annoying, Sandler with an awful accent in an obvious fat suit. Jill isn’t just
annoying to her twin brother, she’s annoying to watch... its obvious Sandler in drag, not a woman who
looks like his twin. This type of humor would be passable in a bad 1980′s body switch movie or an undercover movie. However, in 2011, after 2 Nutty Professor movies, 3 Big Mommas House movies, and Norbit, just having a comedian in drag and a fat suit doesn't equal humor. The other characters, including Katie Holmes are completely undeveloped, we barely know anything about her, what exactly Sandler’s job is, or what the people that he works with do. I mean, Jack and Jill have a "backstory", but its mostly told through two different montages in the beginning of the movie. And these two characters are the only ones that really get any character development. The jokes were bland, pedestrian, crude, dumb, and forced, although I did chuckle a bit at some of the slapstick and bathroom humor, its a very safe PG type movie. I laughed more at how bad the movie was than the jokes the filmmakers wanted me to laugh about.
So why wasn't this the worst movie of the year? Some of the cameos (Drew Carey, Regis Philbin, Norm McDonald) are amusing, but a completely committed Al Pacino saved the movie for me. Now he's obviously cashing a paycheck, but playing a wild, deprecating version of himself, I have no idea why a talented actor would go to such great lengths to stoop to such a low level project (even recent Pacino flops like Righteous Kill, 88 Minutes, and Two For the Money seem like more of his typical role). It seemed like once Sandler had Pacino aboard, he wanted to see how far Pacino would go. I'm not sure if there's much else to say other than a forced "happy ending" and awful musical choices, this was a pretty painful ninety minutes to sit through. Yet, there are two worse.
2. Zookeeper
Between this and Here Comes the Boom bombing, at least we won't be getting Kevin James projects quite as frequently (although both Paul Blart 2 and Grownups 2 are in production). Its amusing because Happy Madison is responsible for the second and third worst movies of 2011. Its
uninspired (talking animals are funny! Kevin James pratfalls are funny!), deliberately calculated/cliched, and forgettable and soulless.Kevin James plays a combination of his characters from Paul Blart (overweight and extremely enthusiastic) and Click (hopeless romantic klutz). He somehow bumbles his way from dating the model Leslie Bibb to the gorgeous fellow zookeeper Rosario Dawson (about as realistic as Scarlett Johanssen's zookeeper from We Bought a Zoo). The most compelling plot point is the odd friendship with the gruff and misunderstood gorilla voiced by Nick Nolte. Unfortunately, this relationship culminates in the most blatant and worst product placement in the history of movies to date, a five minute commercial visit to the movie's sponsor, TGI Fridays.
Its especially sad because the assortment of voice talent behind the various animals is an interesting group. Sandler recruited himself along with Sly Stallone, Don Rickles, Jon Favreau, Judd Apatow, Cher, Maya Rudolph, and even the criminally underused SNL alum Jim Breuer. Unfortunately, all these celebrity animals do is make tired jokes (Stallone as an over the hill lion, Sandler being hyperactive and annoying, Rickles as a cranky frog, etc.) and give bad animal relationship advice (I'm not sure what's worse, the bears (Favreau and Faizon Love) teaching James to roar or the wolf having him pee on a tree to mark his territory). The only thing moderately amusing is TV host Joe Rogan as the jerk boyfriend (a part that Bradley Cooper played much better in Wedding Crashers) but in general, unless you are a massive fan of James, avoid avoid avoid!
1. The Smurfs
And here is the reason why I've taken two months to write this article, my depths of dislike for this movie rival any other I've ever seen (it'd be high on my allltime "worst" list). Unlike the other movies on this list, the Smurfs was a massive success, grossing 140+ M domestically on a 110 M budget but using the name to an astonishing 550+ M worldwide (that doesn't count the toy, clothing, and other merchandising tie ins). This movie did so well for Columbia that a trilogy was greenlit, the second movie of which (creatively titled Smurfs 2) is coming out this summer of 2013... sighAs a very young child (ages 2-4), I loved the Smurfs (and the live action Winnie the Pooh) the most of all the 80s children's programming. I had a cigar box full of the plastic smurf figurines, smurf sheets, smurf pajamas, etc (although unlike some college friends, I never dressed as a smurf for Halloween). Its difficult now to put my finger on why exactly the Smurfs resonated so much with me. The constant conflict with the wizard Gargamel (who apparently thought the Smurfs either had gold or could turn Smurfs into gold depending on the writing) provided the drama. The Smurfs as a group were generally upbeat and more then a little saccharine, but there was still interesting conflict (by age 2-4 standards) between them.
I could backtrack further and talk about Peyo, the creator of the Smurfs (which started as a comic strip, had a hand drawn animated feature in the late 70s, or the controversial UNICEF advertisement in 2005). I also could discuss criticisms of the controversies that the Smurfs have fallen into: they represent a totalitarian society, they are racist/supremacists, or they are a thinly veiled attempt at the promotion of a Socialist state similar to several European countries,
But back to the movie... the opening five or ten minutes actually feels pretty accurate and gets things right. The various Smurfs all working together to prepare for a festival, Clumsy Smurf screwing things up, Gargamel (Hank Azaria frantically mugging and trying his absolute best to work with the poor material) finding the village... And then, a few of the Smurfs find a magic waterfall and end up in Central Park and the movie goes right off the rails...
The characters in the Smurfs are 1 note, simple representations of various professions (baker, poet, farmer, painter) or personality traits (jokey, vanity, brainy, lazy). Focusing on a few to illustrate the problem/moral of the week works well in a 22 minute animated episode. However, as you can see in the poster, the movie only has six Smurfs for the vast majority of the runtime (some of the other smurfs, like Jeff Foxworthy as Handy Smurf and Wolfgang Puck as Baker Smurf are inspired casting, but get literally 2 lines or so each).
So we get Jonathan Winters as Papa Smurf, who at least was in the original. Alan Cummings as created for the movie Gutsy Smurf, who's "Scottish" because of course what Smurfs needs is Braveheart references... Fred Armisen as Brainey, whos suitably annoying, Anton Yelchin as Clumsy (who actually does the most interesting vocal work and sounds the least like himsefl), Katy Perry !?! as Smurfette, and the worst, George Lopez as Grouchy Smurf who comes off as a pretty awful Hispanic stereotype, always complaining about he doesn't want to work or help.
Beyond Azaria, the two main human cast members, Neil Patrick Harris (who I love and needs to talk to his agent to avoid ending up in this dreck) and Jayma Mays (the OCD clean freak from Glee who reminds me of a ginger Anna Faris) play the "straight" characters to the wacky antics of the Smurfs. Unlike the moral lessons of the original show (well, there's a lesson with Clumsy being himself), the Smurfs mainly spoof pop culture/movie lines by inserting "Smurf" in the appropriate places, along with the inevitable "Blue Man Group" reference...
I put the full blame on director Raja Gosnell, whos excreable directorial resume includes the live action Scooby Doo, Home Alone 3, Big Momma's House, and Beverly Hills Chihuahua... ouch... Well, maybe the script has more talent behind it, its from 2 teams of cowroters the first team that brought us... Daddy Day Care and Are We There Yet... Well the second team of co-writers created the aforementioned Zookeeper, Norbit, National Security, and the I, Spy movie...
So with that creative "talent" on hand, its no wonder that the Smurfs disappointed my childhood nostalgia and completely irritated and outraged my adult intelligence... And this summer, I can see the sequel... or count the grains of sand on the beach or stab myself in the eye with a dull butter knife or listen to Pitbull remixed by Gym Class Heroes... Or do none of the above and avoid avoid avoid the Smurfs movie!
