WORST OF 2015: #5-1

Thought it couldn’t get worse than Entourage or The Gallows? Think again – here are our five top picks for the absolute worst of the year, in our humble opinion.

Be warned: these are pretty damn vile flicks, so you bet your arse it’s NSFW…

5 – HOT PURSUIT

This one is just sad.

We absolutely need more female-led films in mainstream cinema, and past films such as The Heat, Pitch Perfect and the entire Hunger Games series have proven that not only can they be profitable, but also good.

But then something so ashamedly sexist and shrill as Hot Pursuit comes by to bugger the whole argument up; it paints all women as nothing more than humourless, psychotic and just plain dumb creatures with fantastic bodies and no other defining features, with men being their ultimate goals in life and having no other desires outside of that. It should come as no surprise that two men wrote this script, a fact that even director Anne Fletcher can’t escape from.

It being extraordinarily unfunny and unentertaining is one thing, but it’s an even sadder case when, in a year where several actresses like Jennifer Lawrence and Patricia Arquette have called for gender equality within this industry, something like Hot Pursuit sides with the misogynists to dent their argument when, in fact, it should be the strongest out of both sides.

For that reason, everyone involved should be ashamed of themselves. Women deserve much, MUCH better than this…

4 – FATHERS AND DAUGHTERS

Speaking of uncomfortable sexism in films this year, Fathers and Daughters actually ends on the message that, and we quote, “Men can survive without love, but not us women” – which is not only offensive to women but also to men when you think about it – and that’s only part of why this is probably the worst screenplay of the year, based on its dialogue, characterisation and plotting alone.

It’s easy to see why  it was buried by Warner Bros in a limited UK release (it has yet to even receive a US release date), as it wastes a highly prolific cast that includes Russell Crowe, Amanda Seyfried, Jane Fonda and many others, forces us to sympathise with characters that do the most moronic and utterly self-serving acts imaginable, and takes itself to places that it is nowhere near talented enough to represent on-screen (Crowe’s well-acted seizure scenes are uncomfortable to watch, but deserve to be in a much better film than this).

It’s ultimately down to director Gabriele Muccino, who has ended up making a more fatuous movie than Seven Pounds, and especially writer Brad Desch who drive this movie to the ground with a movie so sickly it’ll give you diabetes, so preposterously plotted that it defies movie logic, and so painfully frustrating as we sit there watching these unsympathetic people, especially Seyfried’s spoilt brat daughter Katie, try to tug at your heartstrings to no effect.

We advise you to bury this movie as much as Warner Bros tried to do…

3 – SCOUTS GUIDE TO THE ZOMBIE APOCALYPSE

We weren’t kidding when we said in our review that this was our solid #3 worst film of the year – Scouts Guide really is that bad.

Wanting desperately to have its cake and eat it with the Shaun of the Dead and Superbad crowd, but coining both of those elements poorly, it’s just the same kind of zombie horror-comedy that we’ve seen millions of times before, only done much more insufferably thanks to the absolutely juvenile humour on display and moronic characters whose likability stretches as far as a frozen elastic band.

We’re also still reeling over its frankly pathetic objectifying of women, even in a film as clearly teen-orientated as this one, with all members of the opposite sex being viewed as mere objects designed only for penis insertion (even supposed “tough gal” cocktail waitress Denise somehow looks objectified whilst pumping a shotgun) and poor Cloris Leachman – once a comedic actress on top of her game – reduced to a cat lady that anally rims a high-school age boy once undead.

When even the zombies themselves are unentertaining, you know your zombie movie is destined to fail – and fail it has, not only as a zombie film amongst the far better ones out there, but also completely as a movie in its own right. All we want to know is, is there anything in that guide which tells us how to make a better movie?


 

Before we get into the top 2 of this list, we want you to know: it was an extremely difficult decision for which should eventually be at #1.

Both of these movies are TERRIBLE, absolutely disgraceful to the entire medium of film, but in the end it just came down to which one made us angry the most.

The result, we think you’ll find, is slightly surprising…

2 – UNFINISHED BUSINESS

Yes, that’s right. After all the fury, after everything we’ve said throughout the year about how unforgivably awful it is, Unfinished Business – the move that we declared in our review to be “an utter disgrace to cinema, and should be not so much avoided but quarantined and left to die a slow and painful death” – has ended up as the SECOND-WORST film of the year.

There are no words to describe how we feel about this, because until the other film came along we were absolutely sure that this pile of dog turds was unbeatable. It is a truly awful movie, one that doesn’t even deserve to be called a movie because it is the very definition of a “nothing” experience; no story, no characters, no jokes, absolutely nothing to make it worthwhile viewing. It is a lifeless corpse, prodding along the corridor as nobody around is brave enough to put it out of its misery.

Every single person involved, from leading man Vince Vaughn – who here mines to lower depths than even The Internship, and that’s really saying something – to the surprisingly starry supporting cast that includes genuinely good actors like Tom Wilkinson, Sienna Miller and Nick Frost being reduced to being bitterly unfunny and wasteful, to director Ken Scott (who also worked with Vaughn on the far superior Delivery Man) who turns in the flattest, incompetent mess with all the passion of a tortoise on a bicycle, feels completely uninterested, like they’ve all been roped into doing a movie that offers a reasonable and all-expenses-paid trip to Europe in exchange for partaking in this piece of shit.

We couldn’t even tell you what the damn movie’s even about, or who exactly it’s happening to, because we never get an understanding of who or what exactly is happening. It’s all just so damn lazy, and a disgrace to films that don’t even have half the budget of this film yet manage to convey a much better sense of characters, story, comedy etc without even trying.

Unfinished Business sucks – it REALLY sucks. It is an empty, vapid, unwatchable beast that should be discarded the moment you start hearing about it, and buried as far down into the earth where nobody can know of it ever again.

Which begs the question – what film could be so bad that it ends up pushing this to #2?

1 – PAN

Constructively speaking, this is more concrete than Unfinished Business is. It DOES have more of an understanding of story, characters and even how jokes work, and it DOES present itself as having a slightly (but not by much) better reason for existing.

But you know what Unfinished Business didn’t do? It didn’t cost $150 million to make in the first place, which makes this an even bigger insult when you think of all the starving villages or war-torn refugees that desperately need aid that could have benefited from such a donation.

But no; instead, Hollywood decided to instead fund perhaps the biggest insult to a timeless story since the last one.

In so many ways, just thinking about this film makes us furious, but the core reason is a very simple one. Peter Pan by J.M. Barrie is a fantastic story in and of itself, offering a very imaginative but also poignant look at the acceptance of growing up and facing adulthood, and Peter himself is a great character who’s always an adventurous rascal but also unwilling to face up to the most basic facts of humanity, that we all have to grow up at one point or another. Absolutely none of that is on display in this film, and even though it’s an origin story it’s still the most clichéd and tired “prophesy” and “chosen one” story that was dumb even when Harry Potter did it, and it never serves the character or the legacy in the way it deserves to be treated. It makes Peter Pan and Neverland seem boring, and if there’s anything that Peter Pan and Neverland are, it certainly isn’t boring.

Even worse is the involvement of the people they roped in to this, in particular director Joe Wright who, despite making several acclaimed movies that look absolutely gorgeous in the past, can’t even make this film look pretty with some of the most dour and lifeless imagery you can possibly imagine with a hint of the worst visual effects of the year, including one particular close-up that looks like it was a leftover from the effects of the first Harry Potter movie – but that film was made fifteen years ago, what’s THIS film’s excuse?

Nothing in this movie makes sense, is consistent, or anything worth recommending. The acting is all godawful, even from genuinely good actors like Hugh Jackman, Rooney Mara or even Garrett Hedlund whose pre-hook Hook looks and acts like he just buried his face in a stack of cocaine before filming his scenes. The timeline is all messed up, too; the scenes in London when Peter is first taken are set during World War 2, but correct us if we’re wrong but didn’t the original story – which takes place AFTER this apparent origin story – take place in the early 1900s, roughly around when it was first written? The character motivations don’t add up, like the orphanage where Peter grows up has an existing deal with the pirates to take them to Neverland – huh?! – and Jackman’s Blackbeard has to find this “Pixium” – not pixie dust, “PIXIUM” (they’re clearly running out of Unobtainium) – but he has to use the very boy who’s been prophesised to destroy him in order to find it. Then, later on when the characters are at the WHITEST Indian village ever, they have to battle the tribesmen using trampolines. Where the hell did they find materials to make trampolines in Neverland – and why is that the biggest thing that bothers us about that scene?!?!?!

Oh, and did we mention that the very first thing that everyone does when they arrive in Neverland is sing along to Nirvana’s Smells Like Teen Spirit? IN FUCKING WORLD WAR 2?!?!? Pardon the language, but seriously: WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS MOVIE?!?!

Actually, we know exactly what this movie is: it’s the result of Joe Wright taking a bunch of drugs during a repeated 24-hour marathon of watching Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland, and deciding in his drug-induced state that he can make the exact same film, but with a much more treasured children’s classic. Say whatever you want about Burton’s film, but at least it was beautiful and enchanting to look at; this movie doesn’t even offer THAT, and given it’s Joe Wright directing that’s really, REALLY bad.

So, yeah, we get mighty pissed off when talking about Pan; and though Unfinished Business is definitely as much awful as this film we felt that we were definitely at our angriest when thinking about this film. The saddest part is, Unfinished Business was so empty as a film that you can’t even remember much of it not soon after you leave the cinema; Pan is so unashamedly awful and such a gigantic wave of spit to the face of one of the greatest pieces of children’s literature in history, that you’re forced to remember it for the rest of your life.

Never forget, and never forgive, for 2015 was the year of Pan, the worst movie of the year and quite possibly the most insulting movie based off of this particular character we’ve ever seen. Rot in Hell, movie. ROT. IN. HELL.


 

Well, that was fun.

What are YOUR picks for the Worst of 2015? Do they match ours, or do you have your own demons you’d like to vent? Do let us know in the comments section at the bottom of this page, or on our Facebook and Twitter pages!

For a full recap of our Top 15 Worst of 2015, check out #15-11 here, and #10-6 here!

Stay tuned, because tomorrow we start our countdown of the BEST of the Year…

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