The Year’s Worst Movies

Every year there are bad movies, a slew of them, in fact, engaging in a mad tussle to hit every category of filmic badness that exists: Forgettably bad, outrageously bad, amusingly bad, depressingly bad and all sorts of other types of adverb-preceded bad. I managed to miss most of what looked to be obviously bad, but especially in the former part of the year, when I was reviewing a film every week, I did end up at some real stinkers. Here, then, are the films that riled me most, starting with the least offensive and moving to the most heinous.

Hostage: An execrable foray into wanton violence of the least redeeming sort, it’s the sort of film that sends you of the theater seething with anger at the callousness of the producers who put you through their amoral attention ploy.

Hide and Seek: A Robert DeNiro paycheck that stretches the limits of cute-kid terror and twist endings past absurd and into the realm of the godawful. I actually left before the credits rolled, the first time I’ve done that in years.

Aeon Flux: What might have been a subversive little sci-fi flick turned out to be a lumbering, dumb-as-Paul Anderson futuristic monstrosity burdened by inept direction, an incomprehensible, platitudinous script and a serious case of hokey science fiction cliche disease.

The Legend of Zorro: A film so desperate to entertain I almost felt sorry for it; like an awful street musician on a $65 million budget.

Melinda and Melinda: Lacking nearly all forms of cleverness, this pedantic bit of shoveled out tripe is one of Woody Allen’s worst efforts and the pinnacle of the whining, pretentious, self-pitying decay that’s befallen much of his recent work.

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory: Tim Burton’s biggest foible, it’s a self-indulgent, soulless rehashing of the classic flick that trades in hallucinogenic zaniness for an unworkable combination of carefully obsessed over creepy décor and groan-inducing bathos.

Kingdom of Heaven: Ridley Scott’s meandering pretentious, self-righteous take on the Crusades epitomizes the clueless liberal’s approach to religiously motivated violence as well as history. And to top it off, the movie is boring, bloated and marred by Orlando Bloom's insipid stubbornness.

Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith: Visually stunning and narratively dead, no film has ever exemplified all that’s supposedly wrong with post-Star Wars blockbuster filmmaking than this wretched, nearly worthless assault on movie lovers’ wallets. Beautiful, yes, and sometimes exciting in a vicarious, rollercoaster sort of way, there’s still no disguising the fact that it’s also tremendously dull. Star Wars fans may cling to this movie in desperate hopes of proving that all the energy and excitement they’ve put into the series over the past decade (or more) was not in vain, but Lucas’ film is hedonistic image worship at its worst, and the biggest film letdown in a decade.