The worst movies of the 21st century
The 21st century is two decades old already. I feel like I’ve spent half of those 20 years sitting in dark rooms, watching the great and the lousy unspool. And sheesh, there really have been some stinkers.
So here, in chronological order only, is my personal pick of the very worst films I’ve sat through. I’ve kept to mainstream, big budget and widely distributed movies only.
The Village (2004)
There are so many M Night Shyamalan films that could have made the list. From the treesthat-want-to-kill-us in The Happening to the complete letdown of Glass and the still-noidea-what-it-was Lady in the Water.
However, I went with The Village for its overwhelming pretension, for the twist that absolutely everybody saw coming and for being the one thing Shyamalan had never been before. Boring.
Hannibal Rising (2007)
It was billed as some sort of ‘‘origin myth’’ for Hannibal Lecter, everybody’s favourite cannibal.
However, it turned out to be a truly demented World War II-set gore and snore-fest that had me and the one other person in the cinema laughing from beginning to end.
My favourite moment? Young Hannibal glaring at a platoon of German soldiers and intoning ‘‘you ate my sister’’. Twice.
The Vintner’s Luck (2009)
There has to be at least one locally made debacle in here and I’m going with The Vintner’s Luck.
If you hadn’t read the book, maybe it passed as a stagy, inert, but quite beautiful couple of hours about winemaking.
But, if you had read the book, you were left wondering what happened to the love story at its heart. As someone said, ‘‘imagine filming Brokeback Mountain and focusing mostly on the sheep’’.
Twilight: Breaking Dawn – Part 2 (2012)
The Twilight Saga was spread across five interminable films, which ran the gamut from likeably hilarious to utterly atrocious, often within one instalment. But they saved the worst for last.
Breaking Dawn – Part 2 was a film with no reason to exist.
The books were exhausted, but there was still an audience to fleece. And so, a cynical cash-in made up of one long dream sequence fight and a couple of tranches of cringe-inducing dialogue.
Everything looked cheap, the ‘‘vampire baby’’ was seemingly made out of plasticine and the wigs and hairpieces were straight out of the $2 shop.
The Counselor (2013)
I took a date to The Counselor. Both of us were in tears of laughter by about the 30-minute mark. Which is probably not what director Ridley Scott had in mind for a thriller, starring Cameron Diaz, Brad Pitt, Penelope Cruz and Michael Fassbender, about high stakes cocaine dealers.
The Counselor is endearingly awful. And probably worth watching again just to see Brad Pitt’s head actually fall off.
Jupiter Ascending (2015)
Just because I loved every minute of it, doesn’t mean it wasn’t an atrocious film.
The plot – Mila Kunis is a cleaning lady who gets caught up in an intergalactic King Lear,
while saving the human race from being, err, ‘‘reaped’’ – was daft enough. But the Wachowski siblings unloaded a plumber’s truck worth of kitchen sinks over every frame. The result was delirious, hilarious, very nearly unwatchable and a cult among bad-film fanatics. I own a copy.
Gods of Egypt (2016)
Gerard Butler and Nikolaj
Coster-Waldau – as the warring Egyptian Gods of the title – both looked like they were about to collapse in hysterical laughter in every scene. But Geoffrey Rush, playing the Sun God Ra as an
ageing refugee from a toga party trapped on a space station, deserved some sort of medal for his work. Try to imagine Jupiter Ascending-crossed-with-Transformers 2 being put on by a community theatre group, while the audience wave laser pointers and someone throws fireworks. That’s Gods of Egypt.
Now You See Me 2 (2016)
Now You See Me was a 2013 romp about magicians teaming up to pull off heists. Now You See Me 2 arrived to great fanfare and promptly imploded.
The plot was just a sequence of dumb events, the climax was laughable and the casting was terrible. Daniel Radcliffe, fresh out of Harry Potter, turned up as the lead villain. He looked about as threatening as a chihuahua in a handbag.
Book Club (2018)
When they finally consign me to hell, there will be a festival of
Diane Keaton movies playing every night on TV. And nothing else. Everyone has their own personal actor-as-kryptonite and, for me, that person is Keaton.
Here, teamed with Jane Fonda, Candice Bergen and Mary Steenburgen – all of whom have appeared in terrific films – Keaton ushered in a new low in the middle-aged rom-com genre. Book Club was a lazy, tone deaf and deeply patronising load of absolute drivel.
Rambo: Last Blood (2019)
It should have been Stallone’s Logan. But, in the end, it was barely a film at all.
There’s a setup straight out of Taken, then 30 minutes of xenophobic posturing, liberalbaiting nonsense about the ’Murican border with Mexico, followed by a one-man massacre of such surpassing gore and mayhem it inspired nothing but laughter from the few people I shared the cinema with.