With 2013 officially brought to a close, I can now look
ahead to the year 2014....
…But not without a couple side stops along the way. In light
of the end of the year, I decided to take this time to look back on the year,
creating a new feature where I celebrate the best and the worst the year had to
offer. To start it off, I present to you the top five worst movies of the year.
I’ve said that 2013 was a fantastic year for movies, but
that doesn’t mean we still didn’t get some disastrous titles along the way:
After Earth, Diana, Texas Chainsaw 3D… just to name a few. However, I would
like to note that I haven’t gotten around to some of these reportedly terrible
titles, so this is only relegated to what bad offerings I did end up seeing.
Titles that I had hopes for despite their bad reception, or titles I watched
because I guess I just felt like I needed to be punished.
First of all, I want to give out some dishonorable mentions
before we move on. Barely missing out is Only God Forgives, Nicolas Winding
Refn’s take on Dante’s The Divine Comedy, that ends up being a half-baked, garish,
discordant purgatory all its own because of its sloppy direction, whether or
not that was the intention being irrelevant. How I Live Now starring Saoirse
Ronan would have been my worst of the year had it not been for the survival
elements in the second half. Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs 2 was an
obnoxious, unfunny letdown from its highly enjoyable original. The Way, Way
Back gets my vote for 2013’s most overrated, a downright unpleasant mixture of
uncomfortable comedy and tacky drama lifted mainly by Sam Rockwell. M. Night
Shyamalan’s After Earth also gets a mention for its stupid, illogical script,
and uninteresting performances. I’d also like to give a shout out to those
awful voiceovers from Walking with Dinosaurs. Even though the movie itself
isn’t bad, those terrible vocal performances bring it all to a screeching halt.
Anyway, let’s get to the real top five.
Number 5
Planes
One thing that can be said about 2013 that nobody can deny,
no matter how hard they try, is how weak a year in animated features it has
been. I meant it when I said Frozen was the one glimmer of hope to this dull
year in animation, because otherwise we’d be stuck with potential Oscar winner
Despicable Me 2. In a year that has seen annoying talking dinosaurs and time
traveling turkeys, the worst that I saw was the direct-to-DVD turned theatrical
release called Disney’s Planes. Purely conceived as little more than a
marketing gimmick to sell more toys in the Cars merchandise, Planes comes with
neither the heart nor comedy of those films. Even Cars 2 had more passion in
its making than this hunk of junk did. The animation reeks of being generic,
boasting no creativity with the character designs, and doing no justice to the
beautiful locales present in the film. The archetype characters are all written
unimpressively, so hollow that they might as well have been ciphers, which is
an unfortunate waste of the potentially funny voiceovers. The action holds zero
suspense, and any of the film’s feel-good moments are wholly unearned. It’s a
film that begs for more creativity, but I will admit that the only reason it’s
on here is because I refuse to give Free Birds or Justin and the Knights of
Valor the time of day.
Number 4
The Lone Ranger
What. Happened? Gore Verbinski is a great director, as films
like The Curse of the Black Pearl and Rango can attest. So when his latest film
The Lone Ranger was released, I had high hopes for solid popcorn entertainment,
stubbornly so as the negative reception started pouring in. Next time, more
credence is due, because The Lone Ranger is as big a train wreck as they say.
Lacking any consistent tone, the dramatic and comedic aspects clash together
awkwardly. Oddly enough, it’s too silly to be taken seriously, yet too
unpleasant to have any actual fun with. One minute we get quirky antics with
Tonto rescuing John Reid from the villains, the next, we’re treated to Army men
gunning down Comanche’s in droves. EASE us into these elements! Don't jump into them sporadically!
Verbinski simply can’t wrangle any of these
elements together, with a cast that feels as if it wanders aimlessly about
(including a chemistry free Johnny Depp and Armie Hammer), and a two-and-a-half
hour running time (including an agonizing second act) that long over stays its
welcome. This movie was clearly trying to be a revisionist tale in the vein of
The Mask of Zorro, but falls very short of that accomplishment, having neither
the modernization to please new fans, or the same spirit that made longtime
devotees adore it before. The one saving grace is the climactic train sequence,
which is where the movie finally knows what it wants to be, but by that point,
it’s already too late to save this mess.
Number 3
The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones
Nicolas Winding Refn should be thankful that this movie
exists, and that I willingly watched it. Otherwise, Only God Forgives would
have fit comfortably on here. Despite the richly deserved success of films like
Harry Potter and The Hunger Games, the young adult adaptation craze is more
miss than hit at the moment, and The Mortal Instruments isn’t making things any
better. Clearly influenced (I can’t quite call it plagiarism) from the likes of
Harry Potter, Twilight, and Joss Whedon’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer TV series, The
Mortal Instruments feels more like a bad direct-to-DVD imitation than a
legitimate theatrical release. The fantasy genre is one that usually allows for
designers to go crazy with their imaginations and create dazzling worlds, but
the film looks utterly cheap, with distractingly horrible visuals, and
downright ugly production design. One element you also notice is the terrible
editing. This movie is a slog. As the first hour of this movie had concluded, I
just wanted to go to sleep, because this is so hypnotically boring.
Uninteresting characters do not help this, with neither their personalities nor
their paths being engaging. Lastly, I do hate to be so harsh to Lily Collins,
who is very beautiful and charming, and I’m sure is FAR more talented than the
movie she’s in, but she really needs to pick better roles.
Number 2
Ender’s Game
One of the biggest controversies of 2013 came from Orson
Scott Card, an author who made very boneheaded statements of gay marriage,
leading to a subsequent boycott of the film adaptation of his young adult novel
Ender’s Game. Look, I get it. Card is ignorant, he’s reprehensible, and his
statements are completely idiotic (and that’s putting it nicely), but let’s not
forget what the purpose of film criticism is. It’s putting aside your personal
bias for an individual, and judging the PRODUCT – NOT the person.
It just so happened to be that, even if Card were the most
lovable man in the world, the film based on his book would still have been a
catastrophe, so in a way, I'm kind of glad for the boycott. Clearly attempting to make commentary on fascism, the
indoctrination of children into military and the violent nature that comes of
it, the film moves at relentless light speed, hurling exposition at the audience
in a way that no one can keep up. The aforementioned themes feel considerably
downplayed because of this, and the timeline of the movie is incredibly
problematic. In what must have been only a few weeks within the film, Ender
goes from a cadet to military admiral. So I ask… LOGIC?
Even with that aside, it wouldn’t have done anything to
propel Ender’s character. Director Gavin Hood and actor Asa Butterfield
establish little more than a cold connection with the character. Apparently, possessing
incredible intelligence means having no personality at all, and the supporting
cast sadly has no personalities to speak of either. Even the action and visuals
are subpar, holding little to no suspense whatsoever, especially with how
repetitive they are. This would have been my worst of the year if not for one
other movie.
Number 1
The Host
One thing that you’ll notice immediately of my top three
worst of choices is that they are all young adult book adaptations (I can only
imagine what I might have thought of Beautiful Creatures had I seen it). This
gives you insight into how I feel the trend is being misused, and nowhere is
this more highlighted than in Andrew Niccol’s The Host, the adaptation of the
novel by Stephanie Meyer. This was the very first film I saw in 2013. I hated
it, and over time, my immense hatred for it has only grown.
First
thing you’ll notice is the terrible writing. Despite the potentially interesting world that’s been set up, the film
decides to focus on the least interesting people inhabiting said world. The Souls that invade Earth are
peacekeepers, but their reasons and motivations of this are severely
underdeveloped, trying to grab attention away from the dull human characters.
Yet again, we have to put up with another Stephanie Meyer love triangle (more
like a square this time), as one girl named Melanie is in love with a man, while
the soul possessing her, Wanda, is in love with another. This set up is overly
complicated, superfluous, and note-for-note Twilight that it brings the film to
a stop. Then again, what it is stopping really? The conflict in the film is
wholly unsatisfying and far too convenient, leading to characters that hardly
seem to learn anything of their trials. You could argue that this was more to
blame on the source material, but as Catching Fire proved, a truly great
filmmaker will overcome the flaws of the source material to create something
far more fantastic. Niccol just doesn’t get the job done.
The one glimmer of hope is Saoirse Ronan, but even she can’t
keep this mess afloat on her own as she’s also straddled with inconsistent
material. One of the most annoying elements of the film is that her characters, Wanda and Melanie, have a telepathic bond that seems to liken them to a
bickering married couple. I imagine this was played for laughs, but backfires
drastically, and any laughs that are felt in the film are completely
unintentional. This awful voiceover does a disservice to Ronan’s incredible
talents, and when Melanie finally shuts up, it’s where Ronan tends to shine the
brightest.
By far the element that infuriated me the most was the
ending. Without giving much away, after toying around with the idea of a strong
emotional pay off, they opt for nothing short of the most irritating cop out,
further cementing the fact that no one in this movie has to sacrifice anything.
On top of that, the way it all comes to be is pretty disturbing in a perverted
way. This is everything that a good movie is not, and is one I’m too furious at
to forget easily. With any luck, the upcoming adaptation of Divergent will wash away the sour aftertaste these three terrible movies left.
And there you have my top five worst movies of the year.
However, I’m not done with 2013 quite yet. Now that we’ve got all negativity
out of the way, I now intend to gear up for the positivity of next week, where
I’ll announce my top ten best of the year. Hope you’ll tune in for that…
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