The Big Picture's Ten Worst Films of 2008

Saturday

20Dec2008

The Big Picture's Ten Worst Films of 2008

Saturday, December 20, 2008 at 2:50PM

There were more bad movies than good ones in 2008. Usually, the scales aren't that weighted. And just so you know how I come to rank movies one way or another, I begin right in the middle with Three Damn Dirty Apes. Most movies are slightly below average to slightly above average.

So, Three Apes is a good place to start. When the opening credits roll for anything, it's a Three Damn Dirty Ape movie. And then as it distinguishes itself or doesn't distinguish itself, the grade rises or falls.

In most years, there are about the same Zero Damn Dirty Apes movies as there are Five Damn Dirty Apes movies. We don't give out too many Five Ape ratings, which would be an A+ or 10/10 on other scales. That's because there really aren't that many movies in any year that exceed the work of their own genres and achieve absolute greatness on every level. If it's a ten out of ten, there's nothing about it you'd change. It's "perfect." Well, I can think of things I'd change about most movies, so we reserve the Five Apes for special ocassions.

Over the past two years, only five movies have hit that mark: Slumdog Millionaire, Frost/Nixon, Zodiac, The Bourne Ultimatum, and The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. Wouldn't change a stitch about any one of them.

Conversely, a Zero Damn Dirty Ape movie means it's essentially an F-, or a 0/10. For a movie to have not one redeeming quality, not one scene that borders on entertaining, not one funny line of dialogue, nor one interesting camera angle, is very hard to achieve, as well. And we don't even dip to Zero Apes when those standards are met, if that's the right phrase. We look for movies that are in some way both incompetent and repugnant, films that lack any substance and professionalism and then on top of that are wrongheaded.

In the past two years, we've had six movies that failed to register a single ape: Over Her Dead Body, Disaster Movie, The Love Guru, Redacted, I Think I Love My Wife, and The Condemned.

So there's symmetry at the extremes, but where the awful films of 2008 take over is in the intermediate levels of hell; there are much fewer very good to great films from the past twelve months as there are very bad to awful. In other words, we saw more D- and F films than we did A- and A films.

Our list of the worst of the year begins at the bottom of the barrel and works its way up through the sludge.

1 - Disaster Movie

Where to begin? How about with the fact that this is the worst thing I've seen in ten years as a professional critic. The race for worst movie of the year isn't even close. This is in its own category. The only thing that comes close is Freddy Got Fingered, but since I walked out of that about 20 minutes in, I can't actually say it didn't get better.

Devoid of humor, intelligence, story, and character development, Disaster Movie also has the worst possible pacing for a movie like this. Rather than getting in the "jokes" and moving on, this thing draws out what's supposed to be funny, perhaps because it knows that at first blush, nothing in this movie is funny. Why more of the unfunny is better than less, I have no idea.

We've heard a lot of talk over the past week about Wall Street ponzi schemes. This entire collection of Movie movies is the Hollywood equivalent. The men and women responsible are con artists, selling you a bad bill of goods. The studios and filmmakers responsible don't give a continental damn about you. They don't want to entertain you, they don't want to engage you. They just want to steal your money.

There are bad movies all the time, and some miss the mark while others are simply insipid. This is neither of those things. It is designed to be the least amount of movie it can be, drawing you in with appearances of spoofed movies in the trailers, when in fact, everything you see in the trailer exists in the movie for exactly the same amount of time. If Disaster Movie were attempting to be a satire, that would be one thing. All it's trying to do is rob you blind.

2 - The Love Guru

I remember when Mike Myers was funny. But looking back over the bulk of his career, it really has been the same jokes over and over again buried under new disguises.

A lot of the dialogue in The Love Guru would not be out of place in Austin Powers and maybe even Wayne's World. So it's hard to blame him for not being funny now; he's using the same crutches he always has.

Beyond the absence of laughs and substance in The Love Guru, this movie is deeply, deeply offensive. It's a miracle that, in today's rather politically correct environment, it could even be allowed. What's the difference between the offensive material in The Love Guru and the offensive material in Blazing Saddles, a script nobody in Hollywood would touch today? Don't you know? The racial humor in Blazing Saddles is aimed directly at the racists, not the minorities. The racists are the idiots. That's why it's funny.

The Love Guru is offensive to Indians and the entire Hindu religion, making it out to be nothing more than dimestore words of wisdom and silly clothes. The joke is not on those in the film who see it that way, because the film sees it that way.

The cure-all for the many things The Love Guru does wrong, in Myers' mind, is having two elephants hump on the ice during a hockey game. Yeah. That's the payoff.

If ever a movie in 2008 deserved to bomb and deserved to reveal its star and creator as a charlatan coasting on fumes of his decade-old accomplishments, here it is.

3 - Over Her Dead Body

When one of the stars of your movie watches it and feels that it's about 20 years past its prime, that's not a great sign. Paul Rudd talked openly about his disappointment with Over Her Dead Body a couple of months ago and said he felt like he was watching one of those sappy 80s comedies. I'm paraphrasing, but he wasn't; Over Her Dead Body feels exactly like one of those comedies, the kind you flip past on cable at 11am on a Sunday and ask, "Is that Donna Dixon? What is this?"

The trouble with Over Her Dead Body is that unlike Disaster Movie and The Love Guru, this could have been funny. Not with its existing structure, really, but with its cast - Rudd, Eva Longoria, Jason Biggs, Lake Bell - and with some of the situations it presented. It just wasn't.

I mean, how does Paul Rudd not give you one laugh in 90 minutes? How is that remotely possible? But the set-ups are so leaden and the timing so far off all the way through, that it really is amazing that this film didn't even achieve it by accident.

No such luck.

4 - The Hottie and the Nottie

As much as one can, I go into movies with an open mind. I've seen trailers that look fantastic and come out of the movie scratching my head (Australia), just as I can walk into the theater dreading the experience and be entirely surprised and delighted (Galaxy Quest). So you never really know.

The Hottie and the Nottie, in a very bizarre and almost unprecedented way, is exactly what you'd think it is. With the exception of the reveal that the Nottie (Christine Lakin) cleans up much better than you'd expect, there's not a single moment of this movie that moves the needle. And since we've come to a conclusion about Paris Hilton already, that's not a good sign.

You can't even blame Hilton, because she did what she was supposed to do. She played herself. It was believable. But it's almost as if the filmmakers expected that to sell the movie. Man, do they have a lot to learn.

5 - 10,000 B.C.

It may not be the worst action flick I've ever seen, but given the resources available to a director (Roland Emmerich) who has made good epics before, it was the most surprisingly bad action movie in a good long while.

Stupidity is the order of the day here, and the story is so non-existent that focusing on the little details Emmerich gets completely wrong is the only way to pass the time. Here's what I had to say about the moronic lack of attention to detail in this film. Keep in mind, it's called 10,000 B.C. Emmerich could have made it anytime he wanted, but he chose to go all the way back and then present situations that simply could not have happened, and it's impossible not to second guess him when he throws them in:

"The movie jumps the gun on metallurgy by roughly 4,000 years, mathematics by nearly 7,000 years, and cartography and astronomy by several thousand years each. Why is all of this an issue? Well, when you have characters saying things like "Men need to build a circle around themselves" some 7 millennia before circles have a name, and when villains consult the stars through primitive telescopes around the time ancient man was more concerned with divining a way to farm, it's worth questioning. Why have those things in your movie?"

Exactly. On top of that, 10,000 B.C. is boring. Even looking at Camilla Belle is uninteresting.

6 - 88 Minutes

If you haven't noticed, I'm big on what the audience expects from a movie, and what the director and writer do or do not do to meet those expectations. It's not always a deal breaker, but I think when a movie is called 10,000 B.C. and it incorporates things that couldn't have existed then simply because it's convenient, the film falls below our expectations.

The same thing goes for 88 minutes. Ultimately, the job of director Jon Avnet is to make this story 88 minutes long. The movie can be longer, but the action, the whatever-it-is that takes 88 minutes, should take 88 minutes. Avnet has been around long enough to know how to do that, but it doesn't happen.

Instead, we get a movie that lasts well over an hour-and-a-half, and doesn't even start the 88 minutes part of the story until we have under 80 minutes left. Well, then, who cares? Make it two days. A week. A "let me take care of this after I get back from vacation" sort of deal.

The movie is salvageable, which makes it that much worse; why didn't Avnet fight harder to make this better, more streamlined, less ridiculous? On the plus side, Al Pacino does not yell all the way through the movie, though he still wears an awful lot of black. Baby steps...

7 - Meet Dave

With apologies to Uwe Boll, Brian Robbins is the world's worst director. Boll, the Teutonic Torrent, a man who makes more movies a year than some people watch, kind of has to scratch and claw to get things done. Sure, he was sued for bilking a money train out of a couple million buck, but I can have a little respect for a guy who has to work outside the system, no matter how bad he is.

But Brian Robbins has made massive, massive hits, both as a director and producer, and there's no reason, save a lack of imagination and talent, that his movies have to be this consistently lousy: Good Burger, Ready to Rumble, The Shaggy Dog, Hardball, The Perfect Score - hell, his best movie is Norbit.

But Robbins is back again, and finally, audiences crapped on his movie. Meet Dave is no better or worse than most of his other films. It's a lamebrained concept about a guy visiting Earth from the planet What Does It Matter to retrieve some missing pod or some such. To our surprise, the spaceman is actually a spaceship, filled with tiny space voyagers. The ship looks just like Eddie Murphy, although we know it's not really him because he doesn't chase transvestites or bolt from the Academy Awards like a depressed little bitch.

As we said with Over Her Dead Body, there's talent here; you could make something better. Murphy, Elizabeth Banks, Gabrielle Union, Ed Helms, and Judah Friedlander are all wasted. How could you not make me laugh? How?

8 - A Previous Engagement

There's a reason you've never heard of this film: Nobody saw it. And I can't blame them. A Previous Engagement is one of those tacky, syrupy-sweet romances fiendishly designed to attract bored housewives, because it's about a bored housewife who makes the beast with two backs with a lothario who could probably pick just about anyone else at the Maltese resort instead.

I don't expect every movie to be ripped from reality. I don't expect the ones that aren't to play by the same rules, even. But I do expect movies to understand when too much is too much. Even too much of a good thing can be fatal.

A Previous Engagement just keeps throwing ludicrous leaps of logic and unquestionably hokey developments on top of one another. You know when a romantic movie is good? When it could really happen. Not only could nothing that's supposed to happen in this movie happen, none of the connective tissue between those events could happen.

9 - My Best Friend's Girl

There must be something I don't get about Dane Cook. I mean, is he supposed to be funny, the bad boy, hot? I mean, what the hell is it? All I see is a clown who is inordinately full of himself.

And if that's all they're trying to sell here, congratulations. Well done. My Best Friend's Girl commits one of the cardinal sins of moviemaking by creating an adorable, smart, beautiful female character (Kate Hudson) and forcing her to behave in ways a woman like that would never behave. If you ask me about Legends of the Fall, I'll ask you why one of the few Ivy League-educated women of her time (played by Julia Ormond) would waste her life waiting on a man she could never truly be happy with. Give the characters you create credit for being the characters you created.

In My Best Friend's Girl, Hudson falls for Dane Cook. That would be fine if it were really Kate Hudson, because, I mean...track record. But she's got things on the ball in the movie until bad ass Dane Cook swoops in. He's an emotional terrorist, the guy you pay to make the moves on your ex- so she realizes how piglike men really are, with the end result being her rushing back into your waiting arms. Not a great plot device, but it could work.

And Cook poses and wears vintage T-shirts and riffs about men and women in passages that remind us of his stand-up routines. Of course, since they never made it into his routines and his stand-up was that bad, what's that say about the dialogue he chose for the movie?

10 - Nights in Rodanthe

This one is absolute garbage. Nights in Rodanthe, like a great many bad movies, sells itself on the concept before getting to know the characters. In fact, you could run down the list and see the same thing. Discounting Disaster Movie, which has no plot or characters, all of these films are built from the What If out. What if we had a movie about a man who came from space and was actually the spaceship? What if we made a movie about a serial killer that took place in real time? What if we made a movie with Paris Hilton?

It doesn't work that way. Even good movies that are developed storyline first, developing the characters along the way, at least nurture good characters that fit their mold. It's believable to find them in the stories.

Nights in Rodanthe falls into the trap that many movie romances do. It wants to make you happy, then sad, then stronger than you were before. But it doesn't bother to ask the characters what they want. The problem in this case is that you have, again, two characters acting in ways they wouldn't: Richard Gere's straight-laced doctor and Diane Lane's shattered divorcee. It's amazing that, after revealing how completely screwed up each of them is, they don't fall into each others arms as a motion of commiseration, but rather as an act of unshakable love. Bullshit.

That's the headline, but there are many things wrong with this movie. The cinematography is among the worst I've seen in a while, the editing is so bad that Richard Gere walks through the same doorway twice in five seconds, even though it's supposed to be a continuous shot, and then there are the little details, like how Gere's new Bentley, which was parked outside during a hurricane with the windows down, received no damage from the hurricane. That's easy to fix: Put a tarp on the car. Park it in a garage. Throw seaweed and sand in the driver's seat.

But Nights in Rodanthe doesn't care enough to do any of that. All it cares about is hitting its mark. Here's where Diane and Richard meet, here's where they kiss, and because it's a Nicholas Sparks story, here's where one of them dies.

Colin Boyd |

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11 Comments |

Reader Comments (11)

"Where to begin? How about with the fact that this is the worst thing I've seen in ten years as a professional critic."

You're a professional critic?????

Who knew.

Saturday, December 20, 2008 |

wahoorob

Ooohhhh, snap!

Well played, sir.

But yes, I am. Awards, book learnin', and everything.

Saturday, December 20, 2008 |

Colin Boyd

What always interests me about "worst" lists is reading about movies I have long since forgotten. I remember seeing all the ads for that Hey Look What All Our Fancy Computers Can Do "epic" 10,000 B.C. then it came and went quickly, slipping nearly away from existance. Then I read this and remember "Oh, yeah, that came out this year."

I guess that's one of the cons of being a "professional critic" like yourself. You have to sit through all that crap that we don't.

Saturday, December 20, 2008 |

MRPigg

I hate Dane Cook. He isn't funny and he needs to go away.

Saturday, December 20, 2008 |

Lisa

I work at a TV station, and when the hosts of our morning show were asked "What's the worst movie you've seen this year?", one of them immediatly said, "10,000 B.C.". Then she had to backtrack and make some half-assed apologies, as our TV station had sponsored the opening of the film. What struck me as funny, though, is that through all her backpeadaling and "Oops, I guess I shouldn't have said that!" comments, not once did she take back any of the negative comments about the movie. It was just that bad.

Oh, and a movie not on here (but on the link that got me here), "Soul Men" finally proves one thing - people don't flock to movies to see now dead actors (ie - Bernie Mac), so we can put to rest the theory that The Crow and The Dark Knight were only popular (or only AS popular) because a lead actor died before the movie debuted.

Sunday, December 21, 2008 |

Not American

Yes and no; Batman Begins made $205 million in 142 days. The Dark Knight made that much in five days. So, there was definitely a morbid curiosity. Having allowed for that...it's not $300 million or $400 million worth of business. We can credit the film's marketing for a large part of that, since I've never seen a movie presented better leading up to its release.

A lot of people think it's the best movie in who knows how long, so it got a lot of repeat business, and it just became the thing to see. I'm not sure Batman Begins was in that position in 2005.

Sunday, December 21, 2008 |

Colin Boyd

Wait you walked out of "Freddy got Fingered"? So you missed the "Elephant Semen" scene? And the infamous "Daddy would you like some sausage"? !!!

You are a lucky man sir...I am so messed up for watching that film all the way though.

Monday, December 22, 2008 |

Vince

I left when he started swinging the baby by the umbilical cord, but I thought I remembered sausage. Maybe that was in the trailers.

Tuesday, December 23, 2008 |

Colin Boyd

I see a LOT of movies myself - 3 or 4 a week. If it's come out in the last 2 years, I've seen it. Even the bad ones. I read a lot of reviews before I go to the theater. There are certain reviewers who, I swear to God, must be paid by the studios to give favorable reviews to really, really, bad movies.

Colin's reviews are, without a doubt, the best reviews I can find. They are always written as a moviegoer, not as a critic. He, unlike many critics, understands why films work, and more importantly, why they don't. Rarely do I not agree with his reviews.

Keep up the good work, Colin!

Tuesday, December 23, 2008 |

John Waldron

I loved your reviews.

Most movies i agree with you. These where indeed some of the worst of 2008.

Keep up the good work..

Saturday, December 27, 2008 |

Dutchvegas

the Dark Knight.

Tuesday, December 30, 2008 |

Joker

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