The 8th Annual Reel Stinkers Awards

As the final hours of 2013 tick down to the new year, it's time for a little tradition I have here at Reel Opinions.  It's time to take one last look back at the films that stole my time, and the time of anyone else unfortunate enough to watch them.  It's time to list the worst films of the past year, as well as the dishonorable mentions, and the individual awards I give every year to "honor" what I feel were the worst pieces of cinema that I forced myself to sit through.

To be honest, this year may have one or two controversial choices on my list.  These are movies that I know a lot of people liked, but I just absolutely despised.  If you enjoy these movies, more power to you.  Please keep an open mind about my opinion, just as I will about yours.  After all, that's all this is, opinions.  No need to threaten to run me down on the street if you should ever meet me in person, just because I didn't like the same movie you did. (I'm serious, someone actually e-mailed me and told me this, because I did not like a certain Adam Sandler movie one year.)

As always, my "best of" list is still in the works.  There are still some major movies stuck in limited release, and will expand throughout January, so I'm holding off on it for just a little while.  I usually wait until the morning of the Oscars to post my "best of" list, but this year, I may do it sooner - maybe toward the end of January, due to the fact I think I have seen most of the major big films, and there's only a few left.

So, with that all said, it's time to carve some cinematic turkeys, and hope that everyone involved with them gets to do a good movie in 2014.


THE 10 WORST FILMS OF 2013:

10. MAN OF STEEL - I kick off this year's list with one of those choices some people may strongly disagree with.  I know that there are a lot of people who absolutely loved Man of Steel.  However, I also know that there are just as many who hated it as much as I did, if not more.  Seriously, did any movie from this past summer divide audiences as sharply as this one did?  Like I said before, if you happened to enjoy this, more power to you.  As for me, I found it to be an endless assault on the senses, and one of the bigger disappointments of the year.  Superman, that defender of Truth, Justice, and the American Way comes across here as a sullen, depressed and violent jerk who does nothing but fly around, punch people, and destroy everything in his path.  He has no personality, no chemistry or interesting dialogue with Lois Lane, and winds up doing more destruction to the people of Earth that he's supposed to be protecting than the evil General Zod does.  The special effects looked like they were stolen from other movies, the performances were disappointing, Kevin Costner (as Superman's adoptive Earth father) gets the worst death scene I've seen in a movie in years, and the entire last hour of the movie is non-stop mindless action and destruction with no weight or consequence.  This was a murky, joyless experience, with the only moments of amusement being the awkwardly placed product placement for Sears, IHOP, and other establishments during the big action scenes.  This movie depressed me to no end.

09. GETAWAY - What could have been a fun little piece of action escapism turned into one of the more incompetent films of 2013, thanks to the clueless direction of Courtney Solomon (best known for bringing the world the 2000 Dungeons and Dragons film), and the single worst editing of any movie this year.  Ethan Hawke plays a guy who comes home, finds his wife has been kidnapped, and now is being forced by a mysterious villain (Jon Voight) to drive mindlessly around the city in a car, and cause massive damage on his way to save his wife.  Along the way, Hawke picks up a teenage girl played by Selena Gomez, who in 2013, was on a quest to shed her "good girl" Disney Channel image.  She does that in this film by swearing up a storm, the script giving her dialogue so many forced and awkward four letter words, it almost starts to get comical.  Getaway might have worked if it had a different script, director, and an editor that knew how to hold onto an image long enough so we could tell what the heck we were looking at. 

08. R.I.P.D. - I'm sure Ryan Reynolds would not only like to forget this movie, but the summer of 2013 all together.  He had two movies open the same weekend in July, and both of them crashed and burned with critics and audiences.  One of them was Turbo, an animated misfire that you will find down in the "Dishonorable Mention" category below.  And then there was this.  R.I.P.D. (which stands for Rest in Peace Department) has Reynolds playing a cop who gets murdered by his crooked partner (Kevin Bacon), and is sent to the afterlife, where he is recruited into a spectral police force where dead lawmen fight to keep the Earth safe from evil spirits who want to take over the world.  He's teamed up with an Old West lawman (Jeff Bridges, who slurs his words and mumbles throughout the whole film), and wacky hijinks supposedly ensue.  This was supposed to be a Men in Black-style action special effects comedy, but thanks to a troubled production, and heavy editing on the final product before it was released in theaters, the movie wound up being mainly incoherent and dumb.  The two stars act like they don't even like being in the same room with each other, the special effects are lame, and the whole thing pretty much rolled over and died as soon as it hit theaters, guaranteeing we'll thankfully never see a sequel.

07. PARANOIA - How this bomb was able to rope in the talents of Harrison Ford and Gary Oldman will forever remain a mystery to me.  At least they got paid, so they had a better experience than anyone who got to watch this.  Paranoia is a beyond dumb thriller about a cocky and arrogant jerk (Liam Hemworth), whom we hate about two minutes after meeting him, so of course he's the main character.  He works for a technology company, where his boss (Gary Oldman) hires him to perform industry espionage.  It seems that Oldman's chief rival (Harrison Ford) is developing a new hi-tech smartphone that will revolutionize the industry, and is set to reveal it in only a few months.  Oldman wants Hemsworth to pose as an employee at Ford's company, and steal the prototype.  What follows is one of the laziest thrillers I've ever seen, with a cast who don't even seem involved in the material, and action sequences that don't thrill in the slightest.  Not even the sight of seeing old pros like Ford and Oldman being catty with each other during the two scenes they share together is enough to save this stinker.  Paranoia has an attention-grabbing title, but that's about it.

06. WALKING WITH DINOSAURS - Based on a popular TV documentary from the late 90s, the feature film version of Walking with Dinosaurs was a full-out misfire right out of the gate due to two inexplicably bad decisions on the part of the filmmakers.  First off, the dinosaurs talk in this movie, even though their mouths never once moved.  I have been informed by a couple of my readers that this movie was not supposed to have voices, and that they were added in later on due to studio interference.  It shows, especially when the dinosaurs up on the screen are just sitting there, looking at their feet, and the voices of Justin Long and John Leguizamo are chattering away non-stop on the soundtrack, as if something is supposed to be happening.  The second bad decision was to have the dinosaurs talk endlessly, and never once shut up.  It's almost as if Walking with Dinosaurs is afraid that if it gives us a quiet moment or a chance to think for ourselves, it has somehow failed us.  From the inane and juvenile dialogue, to the inappropriate pop songs that show up on the soundtrack, this is the worst animated film of the year, and an example of a film studio pandering to the lowest common denominator. 

05. SPRING BREAKERS - Okay, here's another choice of mine that may be controversial, as I know quite a few people thought this movie was some sort of artistic masterpiece, or a brilliant social commentary on the shallowness of youth.  Me?  I found Spring Breakers to be incredibly dull, extremely tedious, and as blatantly obvious as a sledgehammer to the skull.  The one and only saving grace of the film is the wonderful and terrifying performance of James Franco, who plays a slimy guy who manipulates a bunch of morally corrupt college girls on a beach Spring Break vacation into being violent and murderous thugs. (Not that they were angels to begin with, having knocked over a diner in order to get money for their trip.) This was the other movie Selena Gomez did in 2013 to try to shed her child-friendly image, and the movie actually received a lot of controversy pre-release, as the girls were played by a lot of former Disney Channel and teen-friendly stars.  Look past the controversy, the sex, and the violence, and you have a simple minded film whose entire point was spelled out in the two minute trailer, so the full movie just kind of winds up hitting the same points over and over again.  Franco's performance is the only thing that stands out about this shallow, underwritten bore.

04. THE COUNSELOR - Here is a movie that sounds like a home run on paper, but the final result was so dense and boring, it turned off audiences and critics in droves.  Before it came out, The Counselor seemed like a dream team of talent.  You have the usually reliable Ridley Scott directing.  The screenplay is written by acclaimed novelist, Cormac McCarthy.  And the cast includes such talent as Michael Fassbender, Brad Pitt, Penelope Cruz, Cameron Diaz, and Javier Bardem.  There were signs of trouble when the trailers and ads pretty much focused solely on the talent, and didn't really tell us anything about the movie itself.  In this instance, it was a case of 'If you can't say something nice...".  Many had a hard time following the plot, or even figuring out what the plot was.  And those that did follow it were bored by the endless droning dialogue.  The highly paid and talented cast just sat there, droning on about nothing in particular, while the movie itself never really went anywhere interesting.  The Counselor was one of 2013's most crushing disappointments.

03. SCARY MOVIE 5 - The spoof or parody movie has pretty much been dead for years, and that is nowhere more evident than in the latest, and easily worst, entry of the Scary Movie franchise.  The days of Airplane!, The Naked Gun, and Hot Shots are far behind us, and it's time for Hollywood to accept this.  It's also time for audiences to just stop going to them, and expecting anything better than scenes from recent movies recreated, only with fart and bodily fluid jokes added in.  Scary Movie 5 combines the plots of Mama, Paranormal Activity, Black Swan, Rise of the Planet of the Apes, and even the Evil Dead remake from this year, and wastes every opportunity for laughs.  This was a cheaply made, badly acted, and horribly executed mess that didn't even feel like a theatrical release.  It felt more like something that was sloppily thrown together in a couple months, then the filmmakers tried to con audiences into seeing it.  You can find better movie parodies by amateur filmmakers on Youtube.

02. AFTER EARTH  - As much as I hated Man of Steel, it was nowhere even close to matching what I feel was one of the worst summer movies I have sat through in a long time.  After Earth was a Sci-Fi vanity project gone wrong dreamed by Will Smith as a star vehicle for his young son, Jaden.  The two Smiths play a father and son who live on a distant planet, and have a hard time connecting with each other emotionally.  While on a bonding space journey, their ship crashes on an abandoned and hostile planet Earth, which is populated by some of the worst realized CG animals I have ever seen in a big budget film.  Seriously, I have seen video games with better realized CG than the various animals that threaten young Jaden as he tries to find an emergency beacon so that he can signal someone to come rescue them.  Will and Jaden Smith not only have the worst chemistry of any pair I saw on screen this year, they both give absolutely horrible individual performances.  Will Smith is stiff and wooden, while the young Jaden screeches and screams his lines to the point that I just wanted to scrape him right off the screen, and replace him with a different child actor.  The movie rightfully died at the box office almost right out of the gate, and the only person involved who came out on top was director M. Night Shyamalan, who had his involvement with the film all but hidden, due to a string of costly flops.  Sure, he made this crap, but at least few people realized it.

01. MOVIE 43 - It was not hard for me to decide what was the single worst experience I had at the theater in 2013.  Ever since I saw Movie 43 back in January, it earned an instant spot at the top of my "worst of" list, and it never left.  This sketch comedy film boasts 13 directors, some 20 writers, and a grab bag of Hollywood talent that includes the likes of Hugh Jackman, Kate Winslet, Richard Gere, Dennis Quaid, Liev Schrieber, Naomi Watts, Emma Stone, Kate Bosworth, Uma Thurman, and a whole slew of talent that, I can only imagine, were blackmailed into appearing in this film.  The skits in this movie range from funny ideas that had absolutely horrible execution, or ideas that never could have worked in any way, shape or form.  This is the very definition of bottom of the barrel filmmaking.  If you've ever wanted to see Hugh Jackman play a guy who has a tiny pair of testicles hanging from his chin, Halle Berry participate in a disgusting game of Truth or Dare, or Josh Duhamel as a guy who has a very sick sexual relationship with his pet cartoon cat, then this is the movie for you.  Oh, and you should probably seek help immediately.

Well, that covers the Top 10, but I am far from finished.  It's time to cover the Dishonorable Mentions, the films that were bad, but not quite bad enough to break into the top spots.  Don't let that fool you into thinking these movies are somehow better than what's come before, however.  You should avoid any and all movies that appear on this list.  With that said, let's roll out the next batch of stinkers!


DISHONORABLE MENTIONS:

A Haunted House, Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters, Bullet to the Head, Identity Thief, 21 and Over, The Call, G.I. Joe: Retaliation, Evil Dead (2013), The Big Wedding, The Internship, Turbo, The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones, The Family, Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs 2, Runner Runner, Carrie, Free Birds, Delivery Man, Grudge Match


THE INDIVIDUAL REEL STINKERS AWARDS:

WORST SEQUEL:
Scary Movie 5

MOST UNNECESSARY SEQUEL:
Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs 2

WORST PERFORMANCE BY A RESPECTED ACTOR/ACTRESS:
John Cusack's laughably bad portrayal of Richard Nixon in The Butler

WORST OVERALL PERFORMANCE BY AN ACTOR/ACTRESS:
Jaden Smith in After Earth

WORST REMAKE:
Carrie

WORST IDEA FOR A MOVIE THAT NEVER COULD HAVE WORKED:
Turbo

REPEAT OFFENDERS (ACTORS WHO WERE INVOLVED IN MORE THAN ONE STINKER IN 2013):
Robert DeNiro in The Big Wedding, The Family and Grudge Match
Justin Long in Movie 43 and Walking with Dinosaurs
Chloe Grace Moretz in Movie 43 and Carrie
Ryan Reynolds in R.I.P.D. and Turbo
Selena Gomez in Spring Breakers and Getaway
Vince Vaughn in The Internship and Delivery Man
Owen Wilson in The Internship and Free Birds
Sylvester Stallone in Bullet to the Head and Grudge Match
Tiya Sircar in The Internship and Walking with Dinosaurs

WORST ON-SCREEN TEAM:
Will and Jaden Smith in After Earth

WORST CELEBRITY STUNT CASTING:
The Butler, and its distracting celebrity cameos playing the various Presidents of the United States.

STUDIO THAT RELEASED THE MOST STINKERS IN 2013:
Sony Entertainment, who through their various companies, brought us After Earth, The Call, Evil Dead (2013), The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones, Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs 2, and Carrie.

Well, that's the worst of 2013 in a nutshell.  Time to look ahead to 2014, and hope for the best.  Have a wonderful and safe new year, everybody!

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