The 12th Annual Reel Stinkers Awards

It's New Year's Eve.  And as the clock ticks down the final moments of 2017, 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 2018!

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


THE 10 WORST FILMS OF 2017:

10. THE EMOJI MOVIE -  The best thing I can say about The Emoji Movie is that it is not the end of cinema as we know it.  Given how some of my fellow critics have reacted to it, you certainly would think so.  The worst thing I can say is that it's probably the most generic and underwhelming animated feature to hit the big screen in a while.  The movie introduces us to the world inside of a cellphone called "Textopolis", where little emojis live, and go to work every day on a giant square grid.  The Emoji Movie has largely been made out of off the shelf elements of other hit animated films.  The whole idea of a world within the phone seems to be taken from the video game world of Wreck-It Ralph.  The whole idea of an emoji learning about emotions and what he truly is recalls Inside Out from two years ago.  And then there's the whole theme of bringing us into a hidden world that exists within an everyday object, which has been done so much in animation I'm surprised it hasn't yet gone out of style.  Director and co-writer Tony Leondis says that the movie and the main Emoji's plight to discover where he fits in in the world was inspired by his own experiences of growing up gay, and not knowing how to tell his parents.  That makes this movie sound more interesting than it really is.  Simply put, he has taken a by-the-numbers approach, and does absolutely nothing to make any kind of statement about fitting in that we haven't seen in a dozen other animated films.  This movie became one of the big cinematic jokes of the year, and for good reason.

09. WONDER WHEEL -  Wonder Wheel will make just about any audience member question Woody Allen's decision to release one film a year.  This is a surprisingly amateurish melodrama filled with dull scenes and a repetitive narrative that repeats the same notes and sometimes even the same dialogue multiple times in a single dramatic moment.  This often plays out like a first draft that Allen pulled out of the bottom of his desk drawer, brushed up a bit, and then brought before the cameras before it was truly ready.  To be fair, the movie is beautiful to look at, thanks to cinematographer Vittorio Storaro’s efforts to bring the beaches of Cony Island in the 1950s to life.  But everything that happens within the story and the people who inhabit it never demand our attention.  We're supposed to be watching Wonder Wheel with mounting interest as the pieces of the plot fall into place, and hint at elements of betrayal, lies and revenge.  But as a melodrama, the piece is curiously muted.  Nothing registers, certainly not the overwrought writing of Allen's screenplay, or the largely annoying performances.  In the past, whenever Allen would do a drama, he would at least have something interesting to say about the human condition.  But, he has little to nothing to say here.  It's a simple and basic love triangle story that we have heard too many times before, and we quickly begin to realize that we didn't need to hear it again.  At least not like this, where not a single character or moment manages to stand out.

08. A CURE FOR WELLNESS -  Gore Verbinski's A Cure for Wellness is one of the best looking bad movies I've seen in a long time.  The design of the individual rooms and seemingly endless corridors that make up the film's sanitarium setting are appropriately off-putting, and create a certain sense of dread.  But that's all the movie can muster in terms of thrills.  It's all atmosphere, attached to a story that's not worth the journey it takes to get to the end.  And what an interminable journey this movie puts us through.  At a length of two and a half hours, A Cure for Wellness not only long overstays its welcome, it seems to struggle to fill that time to begin with, which just makes you wonder why this movie wasn't shortened to a more manageable length.  To be fair, the movie is intriguing for the first hour or so.  We're drawn in by the beautiful images, and the early stages of the mystery.  Then the middle portion hits, and the screenplay by Justin Haythe (who worked on the script for Verbinski's equally bloated Lone Ranger film from 2013) just spins its wheels, almost like it's killing time.  When the third act comes, all credibility is thrown out the window by a final reveal that is not only easy to guess from the information that we're given, but also is so bombastic and over the top that it earns bad laughs from the audience.  Like so many other promising thrillers, A Cure for Wellness doesn't know how or even when to wrap itself up.  And the longer it goes, the patience of the audience grows shorter.  This is the kind of movie that could send audiences silently slinking for the theater exit long before it's over.

07. KING ARTHUR: LEGEND OF THE SWORD -  This movie is at times an incomprehensible mess, shot and edited as if the entire movie were a trailer with quick cuts, flashes to other things happening while something else is going on, and out of place voice overs.  The soundtrack at times sounds like music, and at other times sounds like someone just put a panting dog up to a microphone.  And the acting...Well, actually, the acting is not bad, but I doubt even Sir Laurence Olivier could save this.  The film is an endless parade of bad ideas, many showing up one after another.  In retelling the story of the legendary King and his knights of old, apparently director Guy Ritchie decided to make it like one of his British crime capers that launched his career like Snatch or Lock, Stock & Two Smoking Barrels.  That means that Arthur and his pals now talk like modern day wise guy British gangsters when they're around each other.  And while the story is fairly simple and basic, he decided to make it next to impossible to follow by adding a lot of unnecessary directing flourishes such as fast motion, rewinding the film to cut back to something earlier, and cutting back and forth between two scenes for no reason.  To add insult to injury, the movie looks awful, despite its reported $175 million budget.  The colors are often drab and dark, and the special effects look like something out of the late 90s.  When a giant CG snake shows up during the climax, it's kind of hard to look at because it's been so ineptly realized.  Here is a movie completely lacking in scope, grandeur and purpose.  You know, the kind of things one would expect in a King Arthur story.  After the film mercifully ended after an overlong two hours, I felt like I had just watched the rough edit of a potential summer blockbuster, not the concrete vision of a filmmaker.  Parts are out of place, the editing and camera work is a disaster, and everything's just kind of blown up to this grand level of stupid.

06. ALL EYEZ ON ME - All Eyez on Me, a bio-pic looking at the short but complicated life of rapper Tupac Shakur, was obviously rushed to screens after the surprising box office success of Straight Outta Compton two summers ago.  It shows in literally every way.  This script was not ready to go before the cameras.  It's clumsy, disjointed, bland, and does absolutely nothing to show us the man, his thoughts, or his personality.  It's as deep as a puddle, and runs through the facts of his life with all the insights of a Wikipedia article.  There is absolute no flow to the screenplay credited to three screenwriters, or to the direction by Benny Boom.  Taking the most cut and dry approach they can, the filmmakers simply jump from one moment of his life to the next with absolutely no connecting tissue linking the events, or to the people in Tupac's life.  Instead of creating a proper narrative flow, the movie just jumps from one event to another, with some scenes only lasting literally less than two minutes before it's on to the next subject.  For example, a reporter giving an interview will ask about a song that Tupac did, he'll talk a tiny bit about it, and then we see a flash of the music video, before it moves on to the next subject at hand.  Nearly every subject the movie covers, from his mother's early years as a Black Panther, to his close relationship with actress Jada Pinkett is treated in such a perfunctory manner, it barely has any weight, nor is it given any time for it to register with the audience.  There is such a casual indifference that All Eyez on Me takes to its subject matter.  The people who raised him, inspired him, helped him in his career or were there in his personal life come across as non-entities throughout the film.  All Eyez on Me is shockingly bad, and possibly one of the worst films to be made about a music celebrity.  It offers no insights, no opinions, and simply regurgitates facts that fans could learn on any website or article devoted to the man.

05. JUSTICE LEAGUE -  This is a big, dumb lumbering dinosaur of a movie that is as soulless as a blockbuster can get.  Nobody wanted to make this, outside of contractual obligations.  It's a lifeless, dreary experience designed to trick bored teenagers into thinking they're watching something worthwhile.  If the comics that inspired this movie were as bad as this, characters like Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman wouldn't have lasted nearly 70 or 80 years.  To put it bluntly, this movie is hideous.  It's drab, out of focus, and filled with so much quick CG action, the mind often cannot keep up with what it is looking at.  The movie unites Batman (Ben Affleck), Wonder Woman (Gal Gadot), The Flash (Ezra Miller), Aquaman (Jason Momoa) and Cyborg (Ray Fisher), and then gives them nothing to do but fight an army of CG bug people for almost 2 hours.  You don't put heroes like these, and stick them in a nothing plot like this.  Not even the return of Superman (Henry Cavill), who comes back from the dead for this, can muster any excitement.  That's because the movie doesn't give a damn about these heroes, or their histories in the comics.  They are just generic action types here with little personality to show.  Justice League has been plagued with reports of a troubled production and massive reshoots, and it really shows.  You have scenes where the characters talk about things that never happened, because it's clearly been edited out of the final cut.  You have a plot that is barely there, character interactions that are largely missing, and an overall sense that a majority of the film wound up on the cutting room floor.  This is a production that has been micromanaged within an inch of its life by Hollywood executives who were obviously frightened by the dismal response to the dark and gloomy Batman v. Superman last year, and so they tried to throw in as much action as possible here.  By doing so, they have cost the movie any sense of coherency.

04. SUBURBICON -  Here is a movie that is directed by George Clooney, dreamed up by Joel and Ethan Coen (they originally wrote the script back in the 80s, and Clooney and his writing partner Grant Heslov updated it), and stars the likes of Matt Damon, Julianne Moore, and Oscar Isaac.  All of these tremendously talented people have teamed up to make a creepy and unpleasant experience that manages to be heavy handed and tone deaf at the same time.  It's an uncomfortable mix of 1950s satire, a dark thriller about a boy who discovers his parents are murderers, and ugly racism directed at a black family who move into an all-white neighborhood.  Who on Earth was Suburbicon made for?  I kept on watching, hoping that the next scene would provide an answer, but it never came.  The movie is filled with dark, bad feelings, often directed at children who seem to be no older than 9 or 10.  It just repeats the same ugly images over and over.  The movie is trying to be a very dark comedy about the seedy lives that dwell within a quaint little upscale neighborhood, but the movie is so tone deaf, it never builds to any real laughs.  We're simply watching horrible people kill each other and threaten innocent children, who can't seem to comprehend what's going on.  Suburbicon is so bad that only truly talented people could have made it.  Lesser filmmakers and actors wouldn't have the guts to dive this deep off the edge.  George Clooney has worked with the Coen Brothers a number of times, and maybe he thought he understood their work enough in order to mimic their blend of dark comedy and thriller elements.  For whatever reason, he lost his way, and the movie loses all sense of credibility for it.

03. THE BOOK OF HENRY -  The Book of Henry is one of the most uncomfortable movies of this, or any other year.  It's a toxic package wrapped up in the good feelings of a Hallmark card.  Does the movie even know what it is trying to say?  I honestly don't know.  It wants to be an uplifting drama about a loving family, then it wants to be the tragic story of a little boy who loses his battle with a tumor, then it wants to be about revenge, with the mother of the family plotting to murder her next door neighbor who is abusing a sweet little girl.  I almost forgot, the murder plot is actually the idea of the little boy who gets sick before he can carry it out, so he asks his mom to do it for him.   Regardless, the movie still tries to be uplifting and jovial while mom is essentially plotting to murder her neighbor.  I don't remember the last time I have seen a movie fail so hard at juggling its tonal shifts.  Maybe a director like David Lynch could have made something dark and memorable out of this.  He at least would have had the good sense to not try to make it a feelgood movie, and see it for the total insanity it actually is.  But the movie as it is doesn't work in the slightest.  The sentimental moments feel forced, the melodrama is calculated, and the whole murder/revenge plot feels completely off, because the filmmakers try to treat it with the same level of sweetness and sincerity as the rest of the movie.  The Book of Henry received some of the harshest reviews of the year when it opened, and while it deserved to be panned, it did kind of fascinate me in a perverse way.  It's certainly not boring, as the movie is so wrong-headed, I was kind of excited to see what would happen next.  I can't recommend this in any good faith, but I almost want to, as we're certain to never get a movie like this ever again.

02. THE SNOWMAN -  The Snowman is one of the most inept major studio releases in recent memory.  Forget the fact that the script reads like it was fed through a pasta maker and then taped back together.  Forget the fact that the film's director has openly admitted that a good portion of the script was simply unfilmed due to time constraints.  You can even forget the inexplicable and out of the blue appearance by Val Kilmer in a throwaway role, where it sounds like his voice has been dubbed over for reasons unexplained.  The simple fact is, even if the movie made perfect sense, had been edited expertly and was not full of holes (the fact that a good number of scenes in the trailer don't appear in the final film suggest that this movie has been hacked to pieces), it still would be unwatchable due to the fact that it's one of the most dour and depressingly toned features I've sat through in many a moon.  It features one of those narratives that jumps around to different points in time, which at first makes you think it might be a stylistic choice on the part of the filmmakers, but you quickly pick up on the fact that the story doesn't even know where it's going, so it keeps on trying to go in different directions.  Characters literally fade in and out of existence, and whole scenes are clearly missing.  There are whole sections of the film that feel inexplicable and out of place.  And if you should try to follow the plot and solve the mystery, you will be rewarded with one of those endings where the villain shows up, points a gun at the hero's head, and spells out everything when they should just shut up and shoot the hero, thus ending the movie.  The movie is based on a best selling novel that I have not read, but I hear it has little in common with what has wound up on the screen.  In fact, the book's author has even requested to have his name taken off of the film. It was also was originally going to be directed by Martin Scorsese, who walked away, but remains with an "in name only" Executive Producer credit.  This most be how Scorsese's frequent editor, Thelma Schoonmaker, got involved in this mess.  I can only guess the look on her face when she saw the unassembled raw footage, and realized what she had gotten herself into.  There's little to anything left to salvage here, but at least the movie ends on a good laugh - It ends on a note that suggests a sequel.

01. CHIPS -  Of all the TV shows to bring to the big screen, why CHIPS?  Was there really an audience demanding a big screen version?  And if there has to be a movie, why this one, which is very, very bad.  It's the kind of lame, dead in the water comedy that makes you ask the same thing over and over - What were they thinking?  Actually, I know exactly what director, writer, producer and star Dax Shepard was thinking.  He obviously saw 2012's 21 Jump Street and it's 2014 sequel, and thought he could do the same thing by reviving an old cop drama, and turning it into a hard-R parody.  But you see, the Jump Street movies were not only genuinely funny, but they played off the cliches.  And not just the cliches of the buddy cop genre, but also of the entire genre of rebooting old ideas or TV shows into new franchises.  With CHIPS, Shepard has filled his script top to bottom with every four-letter world imaginable, as well as probably every sex joke he could think of.  The problem is, the jokes he has come up with are some the lamest you could possibly dream up.  There's not a single moment here that is inspired, bright or even hopeful.  It's simply a long slog of a movie where the only thing that gets you through it is the thought that it will be over at some point.  CHIPS seems to be trying to poke fun at male egotism and sexual lust, but it gets confused somewhere along the way, and instead ends up glorifying it instead of joking about it.  What we have is a movie with a very nasty homophobic streak, as well as countless scenes where women in various stages of undress throw themselves at our heroes one after another.  But, the movie never figures out how to make any of this stuff funny in the slightest.  This is a comedy that barely makes any effort to get the audience to laugh.  None of it builds, and the actors eventually start to look uncomfortable up there on the screen.  This is surprising on the part of Shepard, when you consider that this was obviously his vision for a movie based on the TV show.  CHIPS is simply wrong-headed in just about every way imaginable, and wrong in a whole lot of other ways, as well.  It's devoid of charm, spirit, laughs, good will and a sense of purpose.


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:

Monster Trucks, Rings, Life, The Circle, Absolutely Anything, Diary of a Wimpy Kid: The Long Haul, Baywatch, The Mummy, Rough Night, The House, Wish Upon, Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets, Kidnap, Leap!, Home Again, Kingsman: The Golden Circle, Tulip Fever, Friend Request, Flatliners, Geostorm, A Bad Moms Christmas, Roman J Israel ESQ., Just Getting Started, Father Figures


INDIVIDUAL REEL STINKERS AWARDS:

WORST SEQUEL:
Rings

MOST UNNECESSARY SEQUEL:
A Bad Moms' Christmas

WORST REMAKE:
Flatliners

WORST PERFORMANCE BY AN A-LIST ACTOR/ACTRESS
Denzel Washington in Roman J. Israel, ESQ.

OVERALL WORST PERFORMANCE BY AN ACTOR/ACTRESS:
Tom Cruise in The Mummy

WORST IDEA FOR A MOVIE THAT NEVER COULD HAVE WORKED:
The Emoji Movie

REPEAT OFFENDERS (ACTORS WHO APPEARED IN MORE THAN ONE STINKER IN 2017):
Vincent D’Onofrio - Rings, CHIPS
Dane DeHaan in A Cure for Wellness, Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets and Tulip Fever
Maya Rudolph in CHIPS and The Emoji Movie
Kate McKinnon in Rough Night and Leap!
Maddie Ziegler in The Book of Henry and Leap!
Nat Wolff in Leap! and Home Again
Cara Delevingne in Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets and Tulip Fever
Halle Berry in Kidnap and Kingsman: The Golden Circle
Julianne Moore in Kingsman: The Golden Circle and Suburbicon
Kristen Bell in CHIPS and A Bad Moms Christmas
J.K. Simmons in The Snowman, Justice League, Father Figures

WORST ON-SCREEN TEAM:
Dane DeHaan and Cara Delevingne in Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets

STUDIO THAT RELEASED THE MOST STINKERS IN 2017:
Warner Bros. for bringing us CHIPS, King Arthur: Legend of the Sword, The House, Geostorm, Justice League and Father Figures


Well, that's the worst of 2017 in a nutshell.  Time to look ahead to 2018, and hope for the best.  Have a wonderful and safe new year, everybody!

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