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So much for 2016 being a watershed, brilliant year for cinema, with the idea of the early year dumping ground shattered by strong releases and a general blurring of release dates into one super blockbuster window. Aside from some stunning successes (Deadpool, Zootopia, Civil War...) it hasn't been great.
Once more, Johnny Depp has proven that he's nowhere near the talent he used to be, video game movies have proven they ALWAYS suck and at least 3 entirely unnecessary sequels utterly bombed. It's enough to make you despair at the characters who pretend to have cinema-goers' best interests at heart rather than being lead entirely by the call of the almighty dollar.
It hasn't been the worst year for film, by any means, but it's hard to remember as many disappointments and so much mediocrity from a slate that initially looked so promising. It's getting better, but the second half of 2016 has a lot to do to live up to its billing.
Luckily, the benchmark of quality in 2016 is mostly pretty low, thanks to abominations like these...
20. The Boss
You'd think that a comedy vehicle written by Melissa McCarthy and directed by her husband Ben Falcone would play to her strengths, but The Boss is a one-note, one-joke caricature comedy that does nothing for McCarthy's image. She's undoubtedly talented, even when she's being profane and outrageous, it's just perhaps best if she leaves the creative control outside of her immediately personal relationships from now on.
As with McCarthy, The Boss casts Peter Dinklage as a despicably bad villain, following on from Pixels' abuse of him and painting no more than a pantomime villain that is utterly beneath him. It's just not funny, and for an incomplex comedy, that's the only thing that could save it.
Strangely, McCarthy feels like she's doing someone a favour here, slumming it briefly to pay back some old debt. But it's her movie, and the blame for the cheap jokes and painfully thin thrills lie at her feet (and her husband's), which is all the more unforgivable given her last two movies (Spy and St Vincent) and how great she was in there.
19. Ratchet & Clank
Releasing a Ratchet & Clank movie in 2016 is a little bit like releasing an Earthworm JIm movie in 2016: there's definitely some residual fandom remaining, but the brand is pretty much over and people will actively question why it didn't come out a decade or more ago.
There's no doubting that the game series was great, or that it might well have translated well to the big screen if handled correctly when the first games came out, but not this year and not in this way.
The film is like a low-budget made for TV feature, which someone managed to attract Paul Giamatti and John Goodman (guys have got to eat) but forgot to spend any of the remaining money on a script. It's dull, repetitive, completely out of date and just not very welcome at all.
18. Special Correspondents
Regardless of how fervently Ricky Gervais defends his latest personal project, there's no getting round the fact that it's not even close to being on the same scale of quality as the likes of Extras, The Office or Derek. Hell, it's not even on the level of his cameo in Stardust or his paint-by-numbers performance in the Night At The Museum films.
Based on a French film - a much superior French film, actually - Gervais' adaptation takes a great idea, strips out the charm and adds in two unlikeable characters with troubling chemistry (which for some reason victimises Gervais' character). The script is woeful, despite Gervais writing, the comedy is thin and the story escalates in a way that is utterly unearned.
There were good elements here, but in comparison to Gervais' better work, it's amateur, and thanks to his preposterous defence of it, it's tarnished even further. And all that from a great, farcical idea of two journalists faking their battlefield reports.
17. The Boy
On paper, The Boy promised a lot: it was set in a great big creepy English manor house, it featured a vulnerable, naive tourist and most excitingly of all, it starred a disturbing looking porcelain faced doll that seemingly came to life. It should have been legitimately terrifying, but the reality was frustratingly far removed from that.
There were some good moments - simple jump scares - but they're few and fair between and by the time the second act is drawing to a close, the film absolutely loses its mind, first introducing an entirely superfluous violent ex-boyfriend and then a ludicrous reveal.
It's just so unsatisfying to learn the disappointing reality behind the supposedly haunted Brahms doll. Why they couldn't just leave it as a simple ghost story, rather than rendering it unrewatchable (there's no way the "twist" works with the mechanics of the scares for the rest of the film)?
The acting is pretty bland, the film is exceptionally dull and the ending is just stupid. Not British horror's finest moment.
16. The 5th Wave
Somewhere in the world, there's probably someone who enjoys watching an assault of YA sci-fi cliches with tepid characters, uninteresting drama and badly misused acting talent. Sadly, that person is not me.
There is admittedly something to be said for the waves of destruction the aliens bring to Earth, but the plot of this supposed trilogy starter feels painfully derivative without having been bothered to pick the best bits to copy off. That might have been forgivable if the directing or editing was any good, but none are, and you're left wondering what sort of promises Chloe Grace Moretz was given to get her to sign on to this dross.
In the end it's a mangled mix of Twilight, Divergent, Independence Day and some sort of soppy day time Lifetime movie, with aspirations to channel Michael Bay's thirst for poor photography and heavy violence. If that appeals, there's something wrong with you.
15. Cabin Fever
14 years ago, Eli Roth made $30m from a £1.5m budget for his first Cabin Fever movie, which wasn't terrible, but which seemed to marvel more in gore than actual scares. Inevitably the cult horror inspired a franchise, with a dire sequel and a terrible prequel, and somehow it's already time for it to be remade.
It's almost as if Roth decided that the film should be made for purely financial terms, but that it simultaneously had to be utterly terrible so as not to interfere with the original. The result is a film that uses the exact same script as the original (aside from some 40 pages of trims), with even worse actors and bargain basement direction, which looks like an insult.
It's just an exercise in wasted time: if you liked the original, there's no way you'd sign on to a very obviously poor imitation, and if you didn't you're hardly going to give the exact same material another go. But at least it'll give bad film-makers hope that there's space for them in Hollywood.
14. Precious Cargo
What on Earth is happening to Bruce Willis?
He's now gone from sleep-walking through identikit boring "thrillers" to basically filling in on movie when Nic Cage passes on them.
To be fair, Precious Cargo must have sounded like an absolute cult dream when it was pitched: legendary Die Hard actor Willis teaming up with legendary TV star Zack Morris from Saved By The Bell (Mark-Paul Gosselaar). That alone would surely be worth the cover price, they probably said, casually thumbing through the script without looking at it.
Because there's absolutely no way anyone involved here was aware of what they were getting into before it filmed. It's a tired, numb-headed retread with roughly zero authenticity in script, dialogue or characters, and yet, astonishingly it doesn't manage to qualify for the so-bad it's good club. It's just utterly dismal.
13. The Darkness
If you're in the UK, there's a good chance you're currently having difficulties forgiving Kevin Bacon for the God-awful EE adverts that run on high rotation on TV. Compared to The Darkness, those annoying commercials are an absolute cake walk.
The haunted house movie is basically a catalogue of cliches: haunted ancient burial ground, historical curses, a poltergeist that tries to steal a child, an exorcist who basically says "this house is clear" and a director claiming its based on a true story.
Unfortunately, familiarity breeds contempt here, and it offers extremely little for any but the most desperate of horror film fans. It's basically a collection of memories of far better movies that you should have watched instead.
12. The Do-Over
If this is the price of allowing Netflix to make their own movies and shrinking their online libraries to cover costs, someone needs to be fired in their acquisitions department.
With The Ridiculous 6 already under his belt, Sandler's second go at polluting the New On Netflix tab waded even further into the drain. Not only does it star David Spade (a sure-fire sign of gutter trash), it also has character names like Ted-O, Maxy-Pad and Shecky, and sort of attempts to channel Trains, Planes & Automobiles only with spies, cops and idiots in place of complex characters.
It's simultaneously memorably stupid (with a convoluted squad that makes no sense for good swathes) and utterly forgettable and most depressingly of all, it should have been entirely expected.
Congratulations Netflix, you've got Sandler for two more of these.
11. Warcraft
Warcraft doesn't just qualify as one of the worst films of the year because of its actual quality, it qualifies - possibly even more - because of its promise and the big lie that tricked a lot of mainstream audiences into cinemas.
When Duncan Jones was hired, the project immediately gained both legitimacy and clout; surely he would bring his usual flair for film-making (honed on smaller, more interesting projects), rather than going over-blown and silly. Nope, guess again.
Warcraft is aimed squarely at the millions of players who already own a World Of Warcraft game. It has occasionally impenetrable lore, which it never bothers to tailor to a mainstream audience it requires to succeed, and the story is unspectacular and populated with pretty one-dimensional characters for all the mythology. Yes, it looks stunning, but that only goes so far, and while it's admirable that Jones has tried to add heart (in a genre that is typically hollow), it's just not successful.
10. Misconduct
There was a time when the presence of Anthony Hopkins and Al Pacino on the same bill would be cause for pretty serious celebration. That time is not 2016, and the bill certainly isn't Misconduct, whose main cast is completed by Josh Duhamel, who is asked to do the majority of the acting while his starry fellows pick up grossly inflated pay-checks.
He's inevitably not up to the requirements, since he's Josh Duhamel, and he's lumbered with a quite astonishingly stupid story, populated with ridiculous contrivances. Quite how it cost $11m is anyone's guess, but there's a good chance a significant portion of it went to getting Pacino and Hopkins in.
It's just a shame they couldn't spring to pay them enough to actually look bothered. In contrast to the film's ever so obvious attempts to be taken seriously (with a forced aesthetic that does it no service), they sleepwalk and make it even more obvious that they don't belong here.
9. Criminal
In a weird quirk of fate, Criminal - an appropriately named waste of time and talent - was one of a pair of films about transferring brains (sort of) into other people starring Ryan Reynolds released within the last year. Even more coincidentally, both were terrible, but Criminal makes Self/less tolerable in comparison.
The film purports to be a high-concept sci-fi, mixing elements of Face-Off with All Of Me and lots of psuedo-science, but it is undone horribly by some fundamental stupidity. For instance, Kevin Costner's criminal (whose only real allusion to being a really bad dude is his skin fade haircut that makes him look ridiculous) is chosen because he suffered major brain trauma that made him a better criminal. Why would that ever make you a good test subject? It's like they wanted to fail.
And therein lies the allegory for the entire, exhausting project: it pretends to be supremely smart and innovative, but it's just silly and retreads a lot of better genre movies. Great cast though, which is sort of the problem too.
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