WORST OF 2013: #15-11

Over the next few days, we’ll be counting down the top 15 stinkers of the year. Which movies were just painful to sit through, and which were vile to the extreme? There’s a lot of movies to rip into, so let’s start with our first batch!

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15 – MAN OF STEEL

No other major release this year – aside from MAYBE Only God Forgives – has split audiences more than Zack Snyder’s big-screen Superman reboot. Those who loved it are passionate for it, and others – us sadly included – thought it was a gigantic waste of potential.

All the ingredients were there for a renowned success: a visionary director, an all-star cast, a bombastic and action-heavy storyline among others. But for whatever reason, the end result was an uneven and illogical mess, sucking out all the enjoyable factors that made Superman popular to begin with and replacing them with dull, pretentious exposition speeches about how much Clark Kent is going to save the world with his incredible powers – except he doesn’t, and actually causes more collateral damage in the climactic scenes than main villain General Zod does. Talk about sending mixed signals, guys.

Nonetheless, this film is actually on the lowest position on this list because it did at least make a little bit of effort to try and be good. It didn’t succeed, but it’s the try that counts. For example, Henry Cavill turned out to be a rather decent Superman (despite having little to nothing to work with in David Goyer’s abysmal screenplay) and some of the visual effects are nice as well, when they’re not blurred out by its obnoxious shaking camerawork.

As a result of Man of Steel, we are cautiously optimistic about the forthcoming sequel in 2015 – the hope is that they can at least improve on the lacklustre writing and directing, especially for something as heavy as Superman going up against Ben Affleck’s Batman. The internet’s already in uproar about Affleck, they don’t need to be let down by the film as a whole otherwise all Cyber Hell will break loose…

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14 – EVIL DEAD

The reason you don’t see a lot of horror films being reviewed on this site is because, in all honesty, our main reviewer – Jack Martin – does not like the genre and very rarely goes to see them. So, for selfish and wimpy reasons then.

The one exception, however, was the new big screen remake/reboot/who cares of Sam Raimi’s cult classic The Evil Dead. Having not seen the original didn’t help – though one hears good things about it – but surely what made that film so memorable today out of other horror films of the time was its straying away from certain genre tropes for the most part. Even a non-horror fan like Martin could pinpoint the clichés this film uses – isolated cabin in the woods? Check. A group of dumb and overall unlikable teenagers? Check. Countless scenes of unnecessary gore and violence that was supposedly fun to watch in the original but here is just unpleasant and rather boring? Does Kanye West have a high opinion of himself?

It had its fans, most certainly, but for us Evil Dead was just not worth our time and money. Here’s hoping that Hollywood soon learns its lesson and stops remaking all the classics sooner rather than later…

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13 – THE HANGOVER PART 3

After the criticism that Part 2 received of it just being a poor rehash of Part 1, you have to give credit to Todd Phillips and the cast of The Hangover Part 3 for actually trying to do something new with the third and final comedy outing.

However, you could argue that makes it worse than Part 2. Not that it was old and familiar, but that it was dull, cynical and painfully unfunny. Introducing elements of a heist thriller was an interesting choice, but the execution was extremely misjudged and only served to make us root against the characters instead of rooting for them. Everyone from Bradley Cooper to Zach Galifianakis to a woefully underused John Goodman looked like they desperately wanted to be somewhere else, especially since the Jar Jar Binks of Asian stereotypes, Ken Jeong’s Mr. Chow, was promoted to a major character if not the major character. In addition, every attempt at humour is either incredibly forced or incredibly mean, a suicide note for any comedy.

It’s a sour swan song in what has to be one of the most pointless movie trilogies ever conceived in cinema. Pray they don’t green-light a Mr. Chow spin-off…

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12 – TURBO

For God’s sake, who in their right mind thought that making a film about snails becoming racing cars thanks to magical liquid nitrogen powers would prove to have nothing but positive outcomes?

It’s astonishing that an animation company that brought us genuinely good classics like Shrek, How To Train Your Dragon and Kung Fu Panda would turn out a product like this for the youth of the world. Its morals are complete toff, its characters are one-dimensional cardboard cut-outs when they’re not being either unlikable or just inhumanly stupid, and the story makes about as much sense as banning the use of dairy products in an ice cream parlour. Its young target audience frankly deserves so much better than this, and to see them waste away precious brain cells on a product such as this that talks down to them at an alarming rate is heart-breaking.

Thank God that DreamWorks Animation also had The Croods out this year, which although not among their best was certainly more entertaining and heartfelt than this Turbo-powered pile of crap…

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11 – THE LONE RANGER

If film critics are playground bullies, then the one kid who got picked on the most this year was Gore Verbinski’s gritty Western. Reports of inflated budgets, script problems, and on-set disasters already doomed this project from the start, and led to its underwhelming worldwide gross of over $250 million and to producer Jerry Bruckheimer’s departure from Disney.

Critical feedback was, needless to say, poor, but is it truly deserving of its punching bag reputation? Sadly, the answer is yes.

It is astonishing to think that $220 million was put into making a film that had little to no comprehendible plot, unlikable characters, and an unnecessarily dark and mean-spirited tone and look to everything. So much unpleasantness, you’ll actually start to question if this is well and truly a Disney film. What on Earth would Mickey say to William Fichtner cutting out and eating a human heart? Chances are he won’t be taking that with a smile.

Thankfully, Johnny Depp does raise the film to “above unwatchable” levels with a fun comedic performance, but aside from that everything you’ve heard about The Lone Ranger is unfortunately true. At the end of the day, it’s just a really bad movie.

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