The 6th Annual Reel Stinkers Awards

As the final hours of 2011 tick down to the promise of a new year, the time has come for an annual tradition I have here at Reel Opinions - Looking back on the worst films of 2011. The films so bad, I was already thinking ahead to December when I saw them, so I could save them a special place on this list. As most critics confess, I'm not really a fan of making lists at the end of the year. But there is something oddly satisfying about giving the movies that stole my time one last knock before I forget about them.

As always, my "best of" list is still on the way, since there are still some movies stuck in limited release that I will hopefully see. I usually get that out Oscar weekend, so it's still a little ways off. Well, enough of this intro. Time to give some bad movies the punishment they deserve.


THE 10 WORST FILMS OF 2011:

10. I AM NUMBER FOUR - I'm kicking the list off with a movie that is, yes, very bad, but I would be lying if I didn't say it wasn't entertaining for all the wrong reasons. This Michael Bay production is a hilariously misguided attempt to mix a bad teen romance drama with supernatural themes (ala Twilight), with the big, dumb, and loud action sequences from Bay's own Transformers film franchise. I Am Number Four is a soulless corporate product without a scrap of imagination, and nothing that hasn't been borrowed from something else. And yet, when the film's big climax came around, which features a battle between alien forces on a high school football field, and a cute little dog (who's been following the teen hero around the whole movie) suddenly morphs into a monstrous alien, revealing that he's been a shape shifting monster the entire time, I was laughing out loud at the ineptitude of it all. There are comedies with less laughs than this Sci-Fi "drama" that was supposed to kick off a franchise, but since hardly anyone went to see it, will go forgotten.

09. SUCKER PUNCH - Director Zach Snyder's attempt to mix video game and Japanese anime imagery with a thinly told story of female empowerment brought about one of the most chaotic, loud, and incomprehensible films of the year. In Sucker Punch, things are constantly happening, and special effects keep on being thrown up on the screen, but we have absolutely no involvement at all, because the characters and plot are so thin, they might as well not exist. We are initially drawn in by the visuals, but then we quickly begin to discover that the movie is not interested in really going anywhere, and the truly tedious and repetitive nature of the film's structure reveals itself. There is absolutely no joy to be found here. It's just a lot of high tech CG garbage, while attractive young actresses stand around, trying to pretend there's a point to all of this. One of the most empty-headed spectacles I have seen in years.

08. MONTE CARLO - This past summer, Bridesmaids proved that comedies aimed at women could be truly funny enough to appeal to just about anyone who watched it, regardless of gender. The same summer, we got Monte Carlo, a comedy aimed at women that is so vapid and idiotic, you would have to have gone through a recent frontal lobotomy to find any of it amusing. This tale of three young friends who con their way into having a luxury overseas vacation was a tired and endless exercise in the Idiot Plot, in which everyone is forced to act like a total moron in order for there to be a movie in the first place. The lead characters are clueless and unlikable, the supporting characters are oblivious morons, and nobody gets to act like a real person. When this movie came out, I read that this was originally intended to be a starring vehicle for Julia Roberts and Nicole Kidman. For some reason, Kidman stayed involved as one of the film's producers. Roberts got out while the getting was good.

07. THE ROOMMATE - This early-year thriller stood out as one of the first truly awful movies of 2011, which earned it an automatic spot here. The Roommate is nothing more than a watered down remake of the 1992 thriller, Single White Female, only set on a college campus, and the characters are about five times dumber and less interesting than the ones in the earlier movie. Leighton Meester (who appears in back-to-back stinkers, having also appeared in Monte Carlo) plays a psychotic young girl who becomes obsessed with her new roommate, and starts mimicking her look, style, and eventually, starts taking over her life. The problem is, the movie doesn't really have a handle on her as a villain, as she seems to do a lot of her evil deeds (like throwing kittens in washing machines, and taking lesbians hostage) just for the sake of being evil. It doesn't help that Meester's performance is so over the top, it's more humorous than scary. Funny thing about The Roommate - It flat out steals from a lot of movies it wants to be like, but doesn't manage to capture even a fraction of the tension or memorability of the films it desperately wants to mimic.

06. New Year's Eve - If anyone wants a textbook example of everything that's wrong with modern day romantic comedies, they need look no further than the dull, boring, overlong, unfunny, idiotic, and completely contrived New Year's Eve. This movie tackles multiple plots, and features a cast of 20+ celebrity actors, but can't think of a single thing to do with any of the actors, the characters, or the plots. Hilary Swank plays the woman in charge of the Times Square New Years Eve party, who just wants to make sure the giant New Years ball drops on time. Robert De Niro plays a man dying of cancer, who wants to be wheeled up to the roof of the hospital, so he can watch the ball drop one last time before he dies. Ashton Kutcher plays a New Year Grinch who hates the holiday, but learns how to love it after he gets stuck in an elevator with a young woman who teaches him how to enjoy New Years. Jon Bon Jovi plays a rock star who wants to patch things up with his ex-girlfriend (Katherine Heigl). Sarah Jessica Parker wants to find her teenage daughter (Abigail Breslin) who has run off with her friends to party, even though she didn't want her to. While I was sitting through this movie, all I wanted to do was bolt for the nearest exit.

05. THE CHANGE-UP - Thanks to movies like The Hangover and Bridesmaids, raunchy R-rated comedies aimed at adults are big business right now in Hollywood. If we get anymore movies as bad as The Change-Up, that could change very soon. This raunchy take on the moldy old body swap comedy formula is bad in just about every way you can think of. But mostly, it's just a very vile and hateful little movie. It hates men, women, children, and babies. It has no respect for anyone, and just expects the audience to laugh at the characters out of spite, instead of humor. The movie concerns two best friends (Jason Bateman and Ryan Reynolds) who are as different as can be, and switch lives when they both take a piss in a magical fountain that allows them to switch bodies. The problem is, we never believe that Bateman and Reynolds are friends, or even like each other. They have such terrible chemistry together, they look like they can't wait to get away from each other during a lot of their scenes together. This would be bad enough, but throw in how unfunny and how much contempt this movie has, and The Change-Up easily ranks as one of the more unpleasant movie experiences of the year.

04. JACK AND JILL - The first of two movies from Adam Sandler's Happy Madison production company to appear on this list. 2011 was not a good year for Adam Sandler. He once seemed unstoppable, really. Sure, his movies were always blasted by critics, but they still managed to be massive success stories at the box office. This year, he released four movies (and acted in three of them), all of which underperformed. Anyone who actually sat through Jack and Jill has a pretty good idea why. This is a misguided and stupefyingly dumb comedy that has Sandler in a dual role as brother and sister. This is a movie built entirely around the gag of seeing the actor dressed in drag, and talking in an annoying screechy voice. This would have been tiresome in a three minute sketch back on Sandler's Saturday Night Live days. In a 90 minute movie, it's excruciating. Throw in a bizarre and over the top performance by Al Pacino playing a caricature of himself, and you have a movie that pretty much defines the phrase "what were they thinking"?

03. BUCKY LARSON: BORN TO BE A STAR - The other movie from Adam Sandler to appear on this list. He was wise enough not to actually act in it, but his name is still all over the movie, both as lead writer and producer. The fact that he released both Bucky Larson and Jack and Jill within two months of each other makes you wonder if he was going for some kind of endurance test. Bucky is a goofy and not very interesting young man (played by Nick Swardson) who talks with a lisp and has all the common sense of an escaped mental patient. He heads to Hollywood to get a job in the porn business, after he finds out that his parents were porn stars in their younger years. It may sound dirty and raunchy, but the movie itself is so mind-numbingly boring. Nothing happens during the course of the movie, there's next to no plot, and the movie is so concerned about getting us to fall in love with Bucky that it never allows him to do anything truly funny. He's just a dorky, overly-nice sap of a guy. The character is a total bore, and so is this lifeless and completely inert movie.

02. CONAN THE BARBARIAN - The only movie that can top The Change-Up in terms of sheer unpleasantness. This is an ugly, vile, movie that throws a lot of dirt, mud, blood, and gore up on the screen to try to hide the fact that there's absolutely nothing worth watching up on the screen. Conan tries to revive the long-dormant franchise (made famous in the 80s by Arnold Schwarzenegger), but ended up giving us a movie so bad and unmemorable that the fans pretty much stayed home in droves. It was cheaply made, badly acted, ugly to look at, reprehensible at its level of violence, and a total chore to sit through. The only saving graces were some moments where I found myself laughing at the film's ineptitude. There's even a moment where Conan is having a sword fight with the film's villain, and as they do battle, the villain cries out, "I don't like you, barbarian!" That makes two of us.

01. ATLAS SHRUGGED PART 1 - It was a very close call for the number one spot, but when I had to think of a movie I saw in 2011 that I would never in my life ever want to sit through again, Atlas Shrugged took the prize. This movie was so bad, I remembered I didn't even want to review it after watching it. I just didn't want to talk about it. Based on the controversial novel by Ayn Rand, this movie is really just an endless series of scenes of second rate actors sitting at tables, talking about nothing that remotely interests us, with random footage of trains and people putting together railroad tracks thrown in from time to time. Everything about this movie seems cheap and slapped together. The actors are second rate, it looks like a low budget made-for-TV movie, and it's probably the most excruciatingly boring movie I have ever sat through in a theater. This is one of those movies that required a superhuman effort on my part just to stay in my seat. Considering that nobody went to see this movie, I can at least take comfort in knowing that Part 2 won't be coming anytime soon. Now if only I could somehow go back in time, and stop Part 1 from happening...

Well, that covers the Top 10, but I'm far from done yet. It's time to cover the Dishonorable Mentions, the movies that were bad, but not quite bad enough to crack the upper tiers of awfulness. Most of these movies are out on DVD by now, so if you should see them, do not make eye contact, and proceed with caution.


DISHONORABLE MENTIONS:

The Green Hornet, No Strings Attached, Sanctum, Big Mommas: Like Father Like Son, Beastly, Battle: Los Angeles, Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Rodrick Rules, Your Highness, Priest, Judy Moody and the Not Bummer Summer, Green Lantern, Apollo 18, Shark Night 3D, Abduction, Dream House, The Three Musketeers, J. Edgar, The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn Part 1, The Sitter, Alvin and the Chipmunks: Chip-Wrecked, The Darkest Hour


THE INDIVIDUAL REEL STINKERS AWARDS:

WORST SEQUEL:
Alvin and the Chipmunks: Chip-Wrecked

MOST UNNECESSARY SEQUEL:
Big Mommas: Like Father, Like Son

WORST PERFORMANCE BY A RESPECTED ACTOR/ACTRESS:
Al Pacino in Jack and Jill

WORST OVERALL PERFORMANCE BY AN ACTOR/ACTRESS:
Tie between Nick Swardson in Bucky Larson: Born to Be a Star and Adam Sandler as Jill in Jack and Jill

WORST USE OF 3D:
Tie between Sanctum and Conan the Barbarian

WORST REMAKE:
Conan the Barbarian

WORST IDEA FOR A MOVIE THAT NEVER COULD HAVE WORKED:
Jack and Jill

REPEAT OFFENDERS (ACTORS WHO WERE INVOLVED IN MORE THAN ONE STINKER IN 2011):
Leighton Meester in The Roommate and Monte Carlo
Ryan Reynolds in Green Lantern and The Change-Up
Adam Sandler for writing and producing Bucky Larson: Born to Be a Star, and for writing, producing, and starring in Jack and Jill
Alex Pettyfer in I Am Number Four and Beastly
Taylor Lautner in Abduction and The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn Part 1

WORST ON-SCREEN TEAM:
Three way tie -
Adam Sandler and Al Pacino in Jack and Jill
Ryan Reynolds and Jason Bateman in The Change-Up
Seth Rogen and Jay Chou in The Green Hornet

MOVIE BLOCKBUSTER THAT DIDN'T DESERVE TO MAKE MONEY:
The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn Part 1

STUDIO THAT RELEASED THE MOST STINKERS IN 2011:
Sony Entertainment, who through the multiple studios they own (including Columbia, Tri-Star, and Screen Gems), released The Roommate, Jack and Jill, Bucky Larson: Born to Be a Star, The Green Hornet, Battle: Los Angeles, and Priest. Keep up the great work, guys!

And with that, I close the book on the stinkers of 2011. Here's to hoping that the people involved with these films learn from their mistakes, and appear in better films in 2012. I guess all that's left to say is let's put the ugliness of bad movies behind us, and look forward to the promise of a new year. Have a happy and safe 2012, everybody!

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