14. Fantastic Four
Can they ever make a good Fantastic Four film? No, apparently not. After the awful 2005 film, you’d expect them to get the formula right this time, things were looking up for this one, with a great cast and an interesting indie director Josh Trank who came fresh off critically acclaimed superhero movie Chronicle.
Then the film took ages to come out and kept getting delayed. And when the film was released, Trank infamously put out a tweet blaming studio meddling for the film’s poor quality. People saw the film. The film was abhorrently bad. A below average superhero film in a massively oversaturated market with rubbish pacing, drab visuals and a leading cast that had about as much chemistry as a fork in a plug socket. There’s honestly not much to say about it. It’s just so incredibly boring and dull that it isn’t worth the word count. Moving on.
13. Holmes and Watson
Okay, so everything before was just a warmup, basically just dishonorable mentions. Now, we’re really in the thick of it, the worst of the worst: Holmes and Watson. This is a film that attracted a major buzz around it before it came out, ‘It’ll be just like Step-Brothers again!’, people thought as they bought their tickets to see it. Those poor souls.
Holmes and Watson is a gross, unfunny, stupid and majorly cringe-inducing film and represents everything wrong with many mainstream modern comedies (the selfie with Queen Victoria part, while brief, is especially vomit-worthy). The plot is mostly incoherent, with a vague central mystery taking a backseat for the whole film to fit in the 400th, ‘Watson is a closet homosexual and is in love with Holmes joke. ‘
The film wastes its amazing cast too, with most of them lazily giving their lines out like they want out of the film as soon as possible. Surprisingly, this one tanked at the box office, could it have been something to do with the early reviews? Could be, but regardless, the film is absolute dross.
12. Death Note
Ouch. Just ouch. That’s likely the clearest and most concise way of summing up the American Death Note film. Let’s get the good stuff out of the way first: Willem Dafoe as the death god Ryuk is incredible casting, hats off to whoever had that idea. That’s all the good stuff.
Death Note is a wound back, wet slap in the face to its source material and fans, turning a great winding mystery/fantasy show with a great central cat and mouse conflict and basically turning it into an inbred cross breed of John Tucker Must Die and the worst films from the Final Destination franchise.
The main character, ‘Light Turner’, is a bawling and unlikeable whiner, who is pretty passive for a guy with AN ACTUAL BOOK THAT CAN KILL ANYONE HE WANTS. Surprisingly, great actor Lakeith Stanfield is just as worse with one of the laziest and uncaring performances of the decade as cool detective turned passive aggressive hipster, L.
The film’s inclusion of new elements, such as making it more of a high school drama film (???) and the over the top gory deaths, make this is a tone-deaf mess. One would expect the director of great, tonally layered horror films, the guest and you’re next to make something special and not some over bloated Halloween special of 90210.
11. The Fanatic
There were two awful Travolta led films this decade, this and Gotti, but this made the cut, because at least Gotti had something of a story. Oh John, what happened to you? Everything was going great until Battlefield Earth, now you’re playing a mentally disabled man in a film written and directed by actual Limp Bizkit front man, Fred Durst.
Travolta’s performance in the fanatic is phenomenal in terms of how bad and offensive it is. His version of playing a mentally disabled character includes screaming, over-aggression, mumbling about nothing and rocking back and forth, that’s about it. In one particularly embarrassing sequence, Travolta dresses up as an English police officer (for some reason) and shouts out nonsense in an awful English accent for far too long.
Did people think a film by Fred Durst would be good? In arguably the funniest sequence of the film, two characters briefly talk about how amazing and cool Limp Bizkit are. Who wrote that sequence, I wonder? Regardless, The Fanatic is horrific, and you should all instead see the film it’s based off, an Indian movie called ‘Fan’ with Bollywood legend Shah Rukh Khan, a great little action/thriller romp that doesn’t end up being horribly offensive and tone deaf.
10. After Earth
Into the top 10 now, and hoo boy, what a ride it’s been. The following films aren’t even going to be funny bad; they’re just going to be bad. M Night Shyamalan, the master of pretentious garbage with such wonderfully awful films under his belt such as Lady in the Water and The Happening, truly peaked in the early 2010’s.
Who knew that making a weird, scientologist vanity project with Will Smith would end up being a terrible film which no one really wanted to see? First off, the acting is likely some of the worst of all time. Jayden Smith plays the terribly named, Kitai Rage, as he meanders and waddles around the CG backdrops with the urgency of a roadkill possum and a permanent expression like he’s ready to either start crying, yawn, frown, sigh or do all the above.
Will Smith plays Will Smith. Again. The world is terribly boring, the action is lame and tedious and again, in the film the father and son duo both have the combined energy and charisma of a damp dish rag thrown into the corner of a flooded, dirty basement, which ironically, is how this film will be remembered: as a flooded, dirty basement of a film. Avoid, avoid, avoid.
9. Slender Man
The ‘Joey King in terrible horror films’ expanded universe continues! This time with a mostly humorless and most importantly, BORING horror film, ‘Slender Man’. With a release date about a decade too late, Sony attempted to jump on the bandwagon of the internet mythos when the wagon had already made its way to the other side of the world and now has a wife and children.
Not only is Slender Man one of the worst films of the decade, it is incredibly insulting to audiences everywhere who paid to see it, Sony literally released the film to make a quick buck and nothing else, they’d much rather forget it existed.
Sony released a poorly cobbled together trailer of ‘spooky stock footage’, about 80% of which wasn’t even in the film and released the film with minor fanfare. Slender Man is such a waste of a horror film, it isn’t scary, the script feels like it was written by a computer and it’s so forgettable that everyone involved wants it to fade away into obscurity. Wait, what was it called again?
8. Saving Christmas
It was a tossup between this and another film that Kirk Cameron was (kind of) involved in, the 2014 remake of Left Behind. However, Left Behind is incredibly entertaining and has Nic Cage, while Saving Christmas is…well…it’s barely a film. It’s more like a faux documentary indoctrination tape.
The ‘piece of media’, revolves around original evangelical heartthrob, Kirk Cameron, hanging around his family’s house at Christmas. It’s all very nice and pleasant but Kirk’s brother in law (co-writer/director of the film Darren Doane) isn’t feeling Christmassy at all, blaming it on the commercialization of Christmas, Mr. Cameron obviously taking notes from Karl Marx’s, ‘Das Kapital’ when helping Darren write the screenplay, bravo Kirk.
The rest of the film is dedicated to Kirk, in his ‘infinite wisdom’, explaining to his brother in law what Christmas is all about. Cue an entire reenactment of the nativity and a retelling of who Santa Claus actually was, featuring one of the most out of place sequences in a film ever created, where in which Santa Claus beats the living hell out of a heretic priest to the beat of an abrasive dubstep track. It’s honestly amazing how films like this are still made but the haters don’t stop good old Kirk from doing what he does best and I don’t think they will for a long time. It’s a Christmas tragedy.