6. Dennis Dugan
Dennis Dugan has been the man in the director’s chair who keeps allowing Adam Sandler do whatever he wants on screen. Dugan has been working with Sandler for almost 20 years now, directing films like “Big Daddy”, “I Now Pronounce You Chuck & Larry”, “Just Go With It”, and both “Grown Ups” and “Grown Ups 2”.
These masterpieces that are now featured on every cable network movie lineup are a true pollution to the airways. I don’t understand how someone can make the same jokes, offensive as they are, and drag tons of people with him every time. I know why! Money. Dugan and Sandler keep making money. People keep going to their movies.
As Sandler has faced more criticism than ever, with his Netflix disasters and even more bad movies, maybe Dugan will go down with him. We can’t even blame Sandler for all of Dugan’s failures, because his movies without Sandler like “Problem Child” and “National Security” are also terrible.
Throughout his entire filmography, not one of his films has received critical praise or even mixed reviews – they have all received poor reviews. That hasn’t stopped audiences from going to see his movies year after year. To date, Dugan’s films have grossed over $1 billion worldwide and he is not making crazy blockbusters, he is making stupid movies about men who act like children.
I’m not going to offer analysis for individual films because so much has already been said about his disasters. But there may be hope on the horizon; Dugan’s last film was “Grown Ups 2” back in 2013. Maybe he is done making horrible monstrosities, or maybe he is basking in the millions of dollars he’s earned off of desperate viewing audiences.
7. Tyler Perry
This man is worth over $400 million! He is incredibly hardworking and I commend him for bringing black people in front of and behind the camera. He is an empire. His offerings have been all over the stage and big and small screens for the past decade. He knows his audiences and sells to them. Acting, directing, producing, and writing, he does them all, but that doesn’t mean he does them well.
Tyler Perry, for all of his efforts, has directed 15 films so far, within another on the way later this year. All of his directorial offers, except for “I Can Do Bad All By Myself”, have received negative reviews.
Some have noted of his use of buffoonish, emasculated black men and sassy black women as his go to and only characters, and that he is selling the same image of black people that has been sold for so many years, because that image sells, rather than being an innovator and showing different narratives and new storytellers.
I do not expect Perry to stop making films anytime soon. He will ride the Madea character until everyone is sick of it, and many people already are. He will use the same characters and storylines because they sell.
However, I challenge Perry to go outside of that zone, embrace new narratives and new talent in the industry. At least support them with the presence and monetary funds he has at his disposal. I will just have to wait to see if he takes that advice, right after “Boo! A Madea Halloween”. I’m not kidding, that is an actual movie.
8. Jason Friedberg/Andrew Seltzer
Where to even start with these two? Jason Friedberg and Andrew Seltzer are the masters of the terrible spoof film. Critics have said they are poisoning American audiences, that they are symbols of the decline of western civilization, and that they are not filmmakers but rather a plague, an evil sweeping the nation.
Friedberg and Seltzer have racked up the Razzie nominations and earned some of the worst reviews ever for their films. Yet, they get to keep making movies, their parody of the Taken franchise, “Who the Fuck Took My Daughter?!” comes out later this year.
Their amazing and varied filmography includes “Date Movie”, “Epic Movie”, “Meet the Spartans”, and “Disaster Movie”; all of these films parody pop culture, film genres, and popular franchises at the time. All of those movies and their follow-up “Vampires Suck” were financially successful, even with review scores in the teens and less.
Their last three films “The Starving Games”, “Best Night Ever” and “Superfast!” have not been financially successful, and maybe America and the film industry are finally understanding how unfunny and bad their movies are. Of course, they have another one coming out, so maybe they haven’t learned their lesson.
They can at least be somewhat funny, as they co-wrote the first movie in the Scary Movie franchise, which got them a lot of attention. However, every other offering they have given the world has been unfunny, full of crass and stupid jokes, and scraping the bottom of the parody barrel.
They spend time and effort recreating aspects of the original film, but maybe they should take more time to actually write the jokes. I really hope their next film bombs and then possibly their crap will never be seen in theaters again.
9. McGJoseph McGinty Nichol, or better known by his rapper and stage name McG, represents everything wrong with cinema today, as he checks off every cliched and action-filled box he can so he can a ton of money exploiting the American public with flash and crassness.
He started off okay; his directorial debut was “Charlie’s Angels”, the entry in the franchise that was at least entertaining, starring Drew Barrymore, Cameron Diaz and Lucy Liu. He also has one of the most interesting filmographies I’ve ever seen; he’s at least diverse in his genre selection, I’ll give him that, but so many of his movies are so devoid of substance.
No matter what the genre is, he just goes through the genre norms and cliched motions in his films. For example, his romantic comedy, “This Means War”, was incredibly generic and a waste of its talented cast, which included Reese Witherspoon, Chris Pine and Tom Hardy. It was truly a waste of screen time. Another stinker with a CIA protagonist (super original there, McG), “3 Days to Kill” at least made back some money.
His newest film, coming out later this year, called “The Babysitter, stars a bunch of randoms and is about a guy who is madly in love with his babysitter, who turns out to be a killer associating with the devil, and it’s the kids job to survive the night and blow up some people along the way. There isn’t much information about this film online; hopefully it’s not real and McG can work on something else, or just not work at all.
10. Brett Ratner
By far not the worst on this list, but he did temporarily destroy a movie franchise for a time, and gave us some unnecessary sequels, such as “Rush Hour 3” and “Horrible Bosses 2” (who asked for a sequel to that?).
After the successes of the first two X-Men movies, directed by Bryan Singer, the geniuses of the world decided that Singer should go direct “Superman Returns” (a real winner that one was), and they should trust the franchise to the director of the Rush Hour films, which were met with mixed reviews at best.
We got the disappointment that is “X-Men:The Last Stand”, which wasn’t bad per se, but was certainly disappointing compared to the first two films, and the franchise had to be saved later by other directors, built from the ground up starting with the prequel.
One film is not going to land a director on a list like this. Ratner has plenty of other missteps, like the absolutely needed (sarcasm) “Rush Hour 3”, which made Chris Tucker’s character into one of the most annoying characters I’ve ever seen, and his true comedic talents were not used properly like they were in “Silver Linings Playbook”, directed by David O. Russell.
Like I said before, Ratner is not the worst on this list, but he has a bad attitude and is very cocky, even though none of his movies are that good. He should just stick to producing instead.
Author Bio: Ryan Anderson is a sophomore at Miami University in Oxford Ohio, where he is studying Zoology and Women, Gender & Sexuality Studies. His love of classic cinema and film history keeps his love for film strong and ever-present in his life.