10. “The Mummy”
One day, a class will be taught on the bloat and greed of blockbuster culture that, fingers crossed! peaked in the miserable early summer of 2017. And few case-study movies will exemplify the flaws of Hollywood thinking in recent years better than “The Mummy.” It was meant to be the film that launched the so-called Dark Universe, uniting Universal’s classic monsters as played by a host of A-list stars with the intention that they would eventually interlock, “Avengers”-style. Perhaps in the right hands — Guillermo Del Toro, say, someone with real love and respect for the classic characters — it might have worked. But Alex Kurtzman’s film is as cynical as the corporate plan that created it, a nonsensical magpie movie that puts together a bunch of elements that it thinks people wants — CGI destruction! Tom Cruise doing ludicrous “Mission Impossible” style stunts! Russell Crowe! — without ever checking if they work together, or if people do actually want those things. It even somehow squanders the charisma of one of Hollywood’s most enduring stars in Cruise, who seems utterly adrift here in a way that he never does even in his most disappointing films. It’s moviemaking by market research, and that it was so thoroughly rejected by audiences, seemingly sinking the rest of its Dark Universe cohorts, was an oddly hopeful thing.
9. “9/11”
Maybe we’re giving it too much credit, but after 90-odd minutes watching “9/11,” we were at least left with the impression that, unlike most of the films on this list, it had something like good intentions at its heart: someone, at some point, honestly wanted to pay tribute to the victims of the September 11th attacks. Unfortunately, good intentions don’t amount to a hill of beans if you don’t know how to write or direct movies, and “9/11” ended up being the 9/11 of 9/11 movies. Based on a stage play, and directed by Martin Guigui, last seen helming the unauthorized “Raging Bull” sequel “The Bronx Bull,” it sees five strangers — janitor Luis Guzman, bike messenger Wood Harris, Russian mistress Olga Fonda, billionaire Charlie Sheen and his estranged wife Gina Gershon — trapped in an elevator together, with only despatcher Whoopi Goldberg for company. Oh, and that elevator is on the 36th floor of the North Tower of the World Trade Center, shortly after the attacks. Wildly overlit to the point that you’ll think something’s wrong with the brightness settings on your TV, and melodramatic to the point that usually decent actors like Guzman, Gershon and Harris feel like they got direction from Tommy Wiseau, it’s clearly taking cues more from ’70s disaster flicks than real events, and it feels utterly crass, cheap and exploitative as a result. It actually might have been less offensive if it was like that M. Night Shyamalan movie and one of the characters turned out to be the actual devil.
8. “Geostorm”
Making Roland Emmerich-directed precursors “2012” and “The Day After Tomorrow” seem like psychologically watertight, hard-science masterpieces by comparison, Dean Devlin‘s directorial debut also manages to convince us that the craft of CG-ing citywide destruction has undergone a significant regression in the past decade. In its sole stroke of brilliance, “Geostorm” casts Gerard Butler and Jim Sturgess as brothers, indicating that their characters’ mutual lack of charisma may be down to DNA or perhaps a shared childhood of malnutrition. The latter would certainly account for why Butler, who plays the genius engineer behind a near-future, ISS-based satellite system that saves the planet from extreme weather events, permanently has the bleary, bloated look of a man who was rounding off a turkey dinner mere seconds before action was called. Sturgess, equating breathlessness with intensity so half his dialogue sounds asthmatic, plays the DC-based suit whose prickly relationship with big bro complicates matters when the satellite system is sabotaged. Geostorm’s badness isn’t just in the macro, though, it’s bad on a granular level: take a news report squawking about storms gathering over “Brazil, Bucharest and Belgrade” as though those three places were roughly equivalent and not the fifth largest country in the world plus two mid-sized European cities about 350 miles apart. So while it’s undeniable that the roles for Abbie Cornish, Andy Garcia, Alexandra Maria Lara and Adepero Oduye are wildly underwritten, when the writing is this lazy, maybe that’s a mercy.
7. “CHiPS”
One of the most baffling things about the studio reliance on pre-existing properties and brands is the shit they end up picking to reboot. While William Goldman’s famous aphorism about Hollywood, “Nobody knows anything,” is in many ways accurate, you could tell basically anyone that an R-rated comedy reboot of 40-year-old Erik Estrada California Highway Patrol TV show “CHiPs” was in the works, and they would tell you that it would make, at best, $18 million in theaters (spoiler: it made that). And yet Warner Bros hired Dax Shepard to write and direct what was presumably a not inexpensive picture, and then doubled-down by actually releasing it in theaters. Teaming Shepard’s former stunt rider with Michael Pena’s bad-boy undercover cop, it’s a movie that you’ve ultimately seen a dozen times before, mostly in the mid-90s when this kind of gay-panic homophobia wouldn’t have inspired the rightly furious thinkpieces that would have resulted if anyone had actually noticed that this thing had been released. A comedy without gags, an action movie without thrills, and a film that does nothing with the potential of the medium, “CHiPS” will be remembered only as long as ‘worst of the year’ lists like this are running before disappearing into the ether.
6. “Daddy’s Home 2”
Before I watched “Daddy’s Home 2” I thought the poster for “Daddy’s Home 2” would be the worst thing I saw all year. Alas, the film follows through on the promise of that photoshop monstrosity by delivering a ghastly, airbrushed festive comedy completely at odds with the current cultural mood. Presumably emboldened by having Sofia Coppola place the original film on her top 10 of the century, this horrible sequel doubles down on the uncool stepdad (Will Ferrell)/cool dad (Mark Wahlberg) hilarity by having their dads come into the picture, and then having one of the little kids snog his stepsister because anything that’s not technically incest is lol! John Lithgow is marginally charming as the daffy tree from which Ferrell’s apple has not fallen very far. But there are some layers of metatextuality that should never be mined and putting a milk-curdling Mel Gibson, with the very real aura of dessicated desperation accrued during his years in the Hollywood wilderness, into an ostensibly bouncy family film as Wahlberg’s casually homophobic, uncasually sexist astronaut bro-dad is definitely one of them. As uncanny as the valley between the poster’s silly putty faces and the real human visages of the actors, the gulf between Gibson’s now genuinely dark screen presence and the blithe tone director Sean Anders seems to be going for, is actually a bottomless abyss of screams. Or perhaps, as suggested by the unironically saccharine rendition of “Do They Know It’s Christmas” that ends the film on a hastily synthetic high note, a bitter sea of tears.