The 11th Annual Reel Stinkers Awards

It's New Year's Eve.  And as the clock ticks down the final moments of 2016, and everybody gets to look to the year ahead, I get to go back in time, and look at the movies that stole my money and my time the past year.

Yes, it's time once again for the Reel Stinkers Awards.  A time when I get to "honor" the worst of the worst that I sat through.  As you all know, bad movies come in all forms.  We've got blockbuster bombs, comedies with no laughs, thrillers that couldn't startle a mouse, unnecessary sequels, star vanity projects that went horribly wrong, and so much more!  I try to pick through the garbage, and find the really big stinkers.  Sure, I could easily make an entire list of cheap exploitation and low budget trash films, but where would the fun in that be?  I want to look back on the films that were big, or at least supposed to be big, and featured big talent, but still managed to fail.

As always, my "Best of the Year" article will likely come around February or so, as there are some late year releases still stuck in limited release at the moment, and will go wider during January and February.  I want to see and review as many of them as I can, so I always hold off on my Best list until then.

So, with all that out of the way, it's time to carve some cinematic turkeys!  Here's hoping that you didn't waste your money and time on them, and let us also hope that everyone involved with them will get to work on a good movie in 2017!

And now, I'm proud to give you...


THE 10 WORST FILMS OF 2016:

10. INDEPENDENCE DAY: RESURGENCE - This 20 years too late sequel to the biggest summer blockbuster of 1996 was a total bomb in every sense of the word.   Even in a cinematic summer that (aside from a few exceptions) gave us one uninspired sequel after another, this one stands out as a total miscalculation on the part of the filmmakers.  It recycles the structure and basic ideas of the first, only with no life and enthusiasm.  It's like watching the Bizarro World version of the 1996 film.  Resurgence plugs in the same elements from the first movie (stock characters, big alien spaceship hovering over major cities, a lot of aerial dogfights and speeches about humanity coming together), and drains the sense and purpose out of it.  All we can do is watch with quiet despondence as the film slogs along.  There's never a sense of tension, humor, or even a scene that demands our attention.  None of the characters in Resurgence (original or returning from the last one) are the slightest bit interesting.  They exist to either shoot at aliens like targets in a video game, or make boring speeches.  The movie did, however, have the most ludicrous climax of all the summer movies, built around Judd Hirsch and Jeff Goldblum driving a school bus full of children through a desert while a giant Alien Queen chased after them.  From the poor dialogue, to the off tone acting, right down to the movie's views on interstellar life, this is as limp a summer blockbuster as there has ever been.

09. MAX STEEL - Based on a cartoon and toy line very few seem to remember, here is one of the goofiest and most downright incomprehensible superhero movies I have ever seen.  Max Steel is downright incoherent, with a plot that makes little sense, and characters that wish they were two dimensional.  It looks like it was expensive to make, but the filmmakers didn't bother to create any original images or ideas.  The hero of the movie wears a battle suit that resembles Iron Man, if Tony Stark happened to be a huge Power Rangers fan, and based his design of his suit on the show.  The villain wears a battle suit that looks like a reject from Tron.  The hero's sidekick is a little robot that looks like a failed design for a creature from a Star Wars movie.  The plot of the movie borrows heavily from 2002's Spider-Man film.  You get the idea.  Now that I think about it, is there anything in this movie that isn't borrowed from something else?  The film's teenage hero is so dull and uninteresting that he makes Peter Parker before he got the radioactive spider bite seem like Mr. Personality.  The plot centers around him trying to find out the truth of what happened to his scientist father, who apparently died in a mysterious lab accident that involved an explosion and a tornado. (You figure it out.) Max soon finds a robot that knew his father named Steel, and the two are able to combine their bodies to become the superhero Max Steel, which sounds less like a superhero and more like the name of a porn star.  For a movie based on an action figure, the plot in Max Steel is unnecessarily vague and more confusing than it has any right to be.  It's also easily one of the dumbest movies I sat through in 2016.

08. DIRTY GRANDPA - The whole time I was watching Dirty Grandpa, I found myself thinking back to Bad Grandpa.  That was that comedy from a couple years ago that featured Johnny Knoxville hidden under old man make up, doing a lot of crude hidden camera pranks on unsuspecting every day people.  That wasn't exactly a great movie, but it had some laughs at least.  That's more than I can say for this movie, where I did not laugh once.  You know you're watching a bad movie when Robert De Niro is up there on the screen, and you find yourself wishing you were watching the guy from Jackass.  And oh yes, Dirty Grandpa is a very bad movie.  Lousy, even.  It's built solely around the idea that De Niro playing a horny old man whose dialogue is made up of endless innuendos, and dreams of having sex with college women is all a comedy needs to be successful.  It exists only to shock and offend.  Okay, fair enough.  But in order for us to be shocked and offended, we also have to be invested in what's going on.  If all you've got is one of our great actors insulting everybody's manhood and screaming about tits and ass, you obviously aren't trying hard enough.  And just like a lot of "adult" comedies we got this year, it tries to get all sentimental on us in the last half.  It tries so hard to push edges and boundaries, and only ends up falling flat with each attempt.  It doesn't understand that merely pushing isn't enough.  We have to be invested in what's happening, and who this stuff is happening to.  Adding a layer of sentimentality to the film's final half hour isn't going to do that.  We have to like these people from the start when they're being crude.  I never liked these characters, and liked them even less when the movie was trying to force me to like them.

07. THE CHOICE -  The Choice is quite possibly the worst romantic melodrama I have seen in a long time.  The fact that it comes from the mind of the master of the genre, Nicholas Sparks, is particularly shocking.  There have been a couple good movies made off of Sparks' books (The Notebook being the gold standard), and yes, there have been plenty that have missed the mark.  But this movie is so lazy as to be mind boggling.  It plays like Sparks became sick of this story and these characters long before the audience does.  In a movie filled with improbable romantic moments, here is the one scene from this film that I will always remember.  After the two young lovers seem to have broken up for a while, the young man Travis realizes that he just can't live without the young woman Gabby.  So, what does he do?  He storms into the home of Gabby's parents, where she is currently staying, forcing his way in, and tells her he loves her and wants to marry her.  How does she take it?  She's annoyed, actually.  How do her parents take it?  They are so immediately smitten by this total stranger they have never met who has broken into their house to propose to their daughter that her mother actually takes her wedding ring off her finger, and gives it to Travis so that he can propose to her daughter with it.  The Choice seems to be a sign that even Sparks himself is getting tired of writing the same love story over and over.  I understand he's got a lucrative deal going on, but if this is the kind of stuff he's going to churn out, maybe it's time to slow down or stop completely.  People will come to this movie looking for some romantic escapism, and all they'll get is a cold and cynical experience by a writer who doesn't believe in what he writes about anymore.

06. ZOOLANDER 2 -  This is a stunningly awful career move on the part of Ben Stiller, who not only stars in this, but also directed, co-wrote and produced it.  It couldn't be more damaging to his film career if it had been made by someone who secretly hated him, and wanted to sabotage his career.  This movie has rounded up a lot of good talent, and then goes out of its way to either embarrass them, or give them little to do.  And since it can't think of anything funny to do with its cast, it just keeps on shoving celebrity cameos down our throats, hoping that alone will amuse us.  I'd wager to say a good part of the entertainment and fashion world gave up part of their time to participate in this.  In terms of cameos, off the top of my head, I can name Billy Zane, Benedict Cumberbatch, Justin Bieber, Kiefer Sutherland, Susan Sarandon, Katy Perry, Macaulay Culkin, John Malkovich, Sting, Willie Nelson, M.C. Hammer, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Susan Boyle, Tommy Hilfiger and Marc Jacobs to name a small few.  Again, none of these walk-on celebrities are given anything to do.  They were just paid to show up.  The plot is not really the issue in Zoolander 2.  It's everything else.  There is simply no excuse for professionals like the names I mentioned above being involved with a movie this wrong-headed and idiotic.  Yes, I know, the first movie was stupid, but it still knew how to have fun with itself and generate real laughs.  This sequel feels like a bunch of people have been gathered together, even though they don't want to be there.  They put on game faces and they try to make us laugh, but the screenplay foils their attempt at every turn by being as juvenile and unfunny as possible.  This is an appallingly tone deaf comedy that tries to get laughs out of the dumbest things possible.

05. NINE LIVES -  Barry Sonnenfeld's Nine Lives is a profoundly stupid movie.  It's about a billionaire New York businessman who is egotistical, full of himself and likes to put his name on every building he owns (Sound like anyone who's been in the headlines a lot this past year?), and how he learns to be a better father to his adult son and young daughter, and a better husband to his wife, while having his soul trapped in his daughter's cat.  Sometimes my mind boggles when certain movies get made.  This is one of those times.  Did anyone involved really think this was a good idea?  What scripts did the actors turn down in order to make this?  The movie stars Kevin Spacey.  Yes, Kevin Spacey, that most gifted and treasured of actors.  The man has won numerous awards, including the Oscar and the Tony.  Now he can probably expect a Razzie early next year.  The cat itself is played by a combination of a real cat, and a blatantly CG one for when it has to leap off a windowsill and bounce off an awning, or when it starts doing amazing dancing and backflip moves.  I'm not blaming the filmmakers for using special effects in order to display things that a real cat simply can't do.  I just wish they made more of an effort, so the effects would look slightly more convincing than Gumby and Pokey.  I will probably never know what drew Kevin Spacey to Nine Lives.  All I can say is I hope he got more out of it than I did.  At least he got paid.  I got to sit in the dark, and wonder what I was doing with my life for 90 minutes.

04. SUICIDE SQUAD -  Suicide Squad is not so much a movie, as it is an explosion at the screenplay factory.  We can see bits and pieces of workable ideas, and maybe an interesting character or two, but they've been pieced together by writer-director David Ayer (Fury) in such a way that the final result is a jumbled, sloppy mess of symbols and plot elements that never get going.  The movie has an interesting premise, taking a group of villains from the D.C. Comics roster, and having them be forced by the government to participate in a suicide mission.  However, it's all set up, demonstration and introductions, and it never builds to anything worth caring about.  Just imagine how fascinating a movie made up entirely of supervillains could have been.  How do they feel about being sent on what is basically a suicide mission for the government?  Do they crave vengeance?  Are they happy to be out on the streets again?  How do they feel about working together?  Ayer's screenplay doesn't come close to even breaking the surface of any of these questions.  Instead, he throws the characters headlong into one fight after another with CG creatures that are not very interesting to look at and are about as bright as the aliens from this summer's Independence Day: Resurgence.  With the severe edits this movie went through on its way to the big screen, it at times struggles to resemble a coherent narrative.  There are random flashbacks, misplaced subplots, ideas that seem like they used to be fleshed out a lot better before they ended up on the cutting room floor, and characters or plot elements that the film just doesn't bother to explain.  That's the kind of movie Suicide Squad ultimately is.  It rushes out information, then doesn't bother to explain or to focus on anything.  Instead, we get to watch a lot of mindless action, when we really just want to know who these people are.  This movie doesn't reward curiosity of interest.  It merely tramples it to the ground and goes screaming forward, creating an ugly, loud and forgettable experience.

03. THE DISAPPOINTMENTS ROOM -  The Disappointments Room is a thriller in name only.  In reality, it's one of the more boring movies to hit in a while.  It has a suitably creepy haunted house setting, and seems to be building to an intriguing mystery early on.  But long before it's done, the mystery has been dropped for total confusion, tasteless scenes of children in peril, and an overall sense of indifference.  The only scary thing about it is that someone thought it was ready to be released.  I'd wager at least 65% of the movie contains nothing but lead star Kate Beckinsale slowly walking through halls and rooms while absolutely nothing happens.  A movie like this needs a smart approach to work, as it deals with such heavy issues as personal loss, grieving, child murder and endangerment and how a personal tragedy can affect an entire family.  But director and co-writer D.J. Caruso (I Am Number Four) has no sense of suspense or atmosphere, so he instead resorts to B-grade tricks such as jump scares accompanied by loud noises on the soundtrack, or ghostly little girls who stare morosely at our heroine, but don't really do much else.   How inept is this movie?  At one point a character is killed and left hanging from a noose on a tree, and is then apparently forgotten about, since nobody brings this up or mentions it ever again.  For all we know, they're still hanging there when the movie's over.  This is a movie completely devoid of thrills and tension.  It's a lifeless, dreary, dead in the water experience that doesn't bother to raise the slightest amount of interest in the viewer.

02. THE BROTHERS GRIMSBY - The Brothers Grimsby features a scene where the two main characters are forced to climb up into an elephant's rear end in order to escape some bad guys who are chasing them.  When the villains leave and our heroes are ready to get out of their unfortunate hiding place, a horny male elephant comes along, and inserts its massive sexual organ into the space where the main characters are hiding, leading to graphic close up shots of the film's stars being slapped in the face by the intruding organ.  You just never know what you're going to see when you're at the movies!  The two stars in question who find themselves in this predicament are Sacha Baron Cohen and Mark Strong.  Both are fine actors, but are cast to the winds here by a mostly witless screenplay, which was co-written by Cohen.   It's intended to be a spy spoof, but it doesn't try to find any humor in the genre.  Instead, it takes aim at the poor and uneducated of England, the handicapped, AIDS, and celebrities like Daniel Radcliffe, Bill Cosby and Donald Trump.  Oh, and it also is obsessed with gags concerning anal cavities.  Besides the one involving the elephant, it also has a running gag about how Cohen finds himself in situations with a lighted firework stuck up his nether regions.  This is a movie that the filmmakers obviously knew wasn't working while they were making it, so they tried to throw in a lot of shock humor to grab our attention.  Nothing works here.  The overall tone of the movie is morose for a comedy, the editing looks like it was hacked with a chainsaw leading to gaping plot holes, and nobody looks like they were having fun making this.  The audience shares in their misery.

01. MOTHER'S DAY - I have a few questions regarding Mother's Day.  First, from what deep pit of romantic comedy sitcom hell did this movie spawn from?  Second, how does a movie this insulting even get made?  And third, what possessed talented people like Julia Roberts, Jennifer Aniston, Jason Sudeikis and Kate Hudson to get involved with it?  Did they all lose a bet?  The movie is directed by Garry Marshall (who passed away shortly after this came out), and I know he had a reputation for being one of the nicest guys in Hollywood to work with.  But no matter how great of a guy he was, nothing can excuse this movie.  Here is a film filled with one improbable scene after another, as the movie combines a bunch of intersecting plots and characters all built around the days leading up to the titular holiday.  Such plots include two people getting their hands stuck in a vending machine and falling in love with each other while trapped, some racist and homophobic redneck parents learning to accept their daughters (one of whom is married to an Indian man, and the other is a lesbian), a police chase involving a parade float made up of a paper mache vagina, and a woman getting advice on love and relationships from a very wise birthday clown.  Is there anyone reading this who thinks this sounds like a remotely plausible movie?  Heck, I don't think these ideas credited to three different screenwriters could have seemed plausible or even workable on paper.  Blown up on the big screen, and seeing these likable actors drudging through material like this is akin to watching your friends and family have to wallow through mud.  It's depressing, and you just want it to stop as quickly as possible.  There's not a single moment that isn't calculated, manipulative, sappy or idiotic.  Watching this movie, you almost feel like the people involved have never even seen a movie in their lives.  Yet, there are a lot of professionals both on and behind the camera.  Heck, Garry Marshall had 18 feature films to his credit.  But you wouldn't know that here.  Mother's Day is simply insulting.  It's insulting to its namesake holiday, insulting to mothers in general, and insulting to the intelligence of anyone who watches it.  But hey, at least it has a happy ending!  People fall in love, families are reunited, and the movie ends.  I liked that last part the best.


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:

Ride Along 2, Norm of the North, The Boy, Jane Got a Gun, How to Be Single, Gods of Egypt, Triple 9, London Has Fallen, Hardcore Henry, The Boss, Criminal, The Huntsman: Winter's War, Ratchet & Clank, The Darkness, Neighbors 2: Sorority Rising, Warcraft, Free State of Jones, The Purge: Election Year, Ghostbusters, Ice Age: Collision Course: Sausage Party, Mechanic: Resurrection, Morgan, Blair Witch, Masterminds, Keeping Up with the Joneses, Shut In, Collateral Beauty, Assassin's Creed, Why Him?


INDIVIDUAL REEL STINKERS AWARDS: 

WORST SEQUEL:
Zoolander 2

MOST UNNECESSARY SEQUEL:
Blair Witch

WORST REMAKE:
Ghostbusters

WORST PERFORMANCE BY AN A-LIST ACTOR/ACTRESS:
Kevin Spacey in Nine Lives 

OVERALL WORST PERFORMANCE BY AN ACTOR/ACTRESS:
Jesse Eisenberg in Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice

WORST IDEA FOR A MOVIE THAT NEVER COULD HAVE WORKED:
Mother's Day

REPEAT OFFENDERS (ACTORS WHO WERE INVOLVED IN MORE THAN ONE STINKER IN 2016):
Ken Jeong in Ride Along 2 and Norm of the North
Penelope Cruz in Zoolander 2 and The Brothers Grimsby
Rebel Wilson in How to Be Single and The Brothers Grimsby
Gerard Butler in Gods of Egypt and London Has Fallen
Gal Gadot in Triple 9, Criminal and Keeping Up with the Joneses
Radha Mitchell in London Has Fallen and The Darkness
Zac Efron in Dirty Grandpa and Neighbors 2: Sorority Rising
Kristen Wiig in Zoolander 2,  Ghostbusters, Sausage Party and Masterminds
Melissa McCarthy in The Boss and Ghostbusters
Chris Hemsworth in The Huntsman: Winter’s War and Ghostbusters
Jennifer Garner in Mother’s Day and Nine Lives
Seth Rogen in Neighbors 2: Sorority Rising and Sausage Party
Tommy Lee Jones in Criminal and Mechanic: Resurrection
Sam Hazeldine in The Brothers Grimsby, The Huntsman: Winter’s War and Mechanic: Resurrection
Michelle Yeoh in Mechanic: Resurrection and Morgan
Kate McKinnon in Ghostbusters and Masterminds
Leslie Jones in Ghostbusters and Masterminds
Jason Sudeikis in Mother’s Day and Masterminds
Owen Wilson in Zoolander 2 and Masterminds
Andy Garcia in Ghostbusters and Max Steel
Zach Galifianakis in Masterminds and Keeping Up with the Joneses
Isla Fisher in The Brothers Grimsby and Keeping Up with the Joneses
Will Smith in Suicide Squad and Collateral Beauty

Adam Devine in Ice Age: Collision Course and Why Him?

Zoey Deutch in Dirty Grandpa and Why Him?

WORST ON-SCREEN TEAM:
Max and Steel in Max Steel

MOST OBNOXIOUS MARKETING AND PRE-RELEASE HYPE:
Ghostbusters

STUDIO THAT RELEASED THE MOST STINKERS IN 2016:
Lionsgate/Summit Films for bringing us Norm of the North, Dirty Grandpa, The Choice, Gods of Egypt, Criminal, Mechanic: Resurrection, and Blair Witch

Well, that's the worst of 2016 in a nutshell.  Time to look ahead to 2017, and hope for the best.  Have a wonderful and safe new year, everybody!

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