Worst 10 movies of 2016

The worst films of the year list is sometimes more enjoyable than the top 10 or 20 best films of the years lists of the year because people do like reading about how much someone hates something. Personally, I don’t like being negative but I disliked these films such much that they prop the list of films I saw from 2016 (which is well over 120) as the worst of the lot. My much more positive top 20 list will come soon after I have seen the likes of Lion, Fences, and Hidden Figures. I want the most complete list as possible.

10. Benhur

I have nothing to say but ‘why’? Why remake it? Nobody wanted it. $100,000,000 worth of people saw it….still wasn't enough to avoid making a loss.

9. Assassins Creed

Video game adaptations are very rarely good and the latest film to keep up that trend is Assassins Creed. Based on the video game, of the same name, the best bits about the game were exploring the historical worlds the developers and artists created which is why its bloody bizarre that the film spends so little time in the past and the time we do spend in 15^th century Madrid is so clouded by dust that it’s impossible to see anything.

8. The Darkness

The Darkness is your typical forgettable horror fare that goes through the usual cliches. It’s rather disappointing that Greg Mclean, the director of the unforgettable and brutal Wolf Creek, would churn out something so forgettable.

7. Divergent.

Hello Lionsgate. This is one of your four appearances in this list. After fucking over one of the films in this list, you failed miserably with Gods of Egypt and also with Divergent: Allegiant. Allegiant was such a box office failure that the studio decided to make the final film a TV film because the first part of the final film did so badly at the cinema.

Why are the films forgettable rubbish? Well because there’s some many Young Adult franchises out there already that Divergent just feels stale and unoriginal. We’ve seen it all before, and the film's blandness ensured that it failed to win over people who haven’t read the novel, unlike The Hunger Games which won fans outside the original fan base (myself included).
.

6. Mojave

Directed by William Monahan, the same guy who wrote The Departed, Mojave is a rambling self indulgent film about temptation and other biblical references. There’s some good performances from Oscar Isaac and Garrett Hedlund but too much self indulgence from Monahan became the film’s downfall as it made it a boring thriller where investment in the characters and story was in short supply.

5. Gods of Egypt

Director Alex Proyas went off on one when the negative critical reviews rolled in, he labelled critics less than worthless’ and vultures. Critic Mark Kermode responded by suggesting that Alex Proyas is calling his own film a carcass (because of the vulture comment), Kermode was then cordially invited to ‘go fuck himself’ by Proyas.

Maybe Proyas is acting up because he knows he made a generally bad film and doesn’t want to admit it. The GCI is terrible, the performances are poor, and the script is a mess. It had so much potential, and there are cool ideas there but when you get such bland performances from the lead actors the end result is never going to be a great one.

4. Zoolander 2

There are a lot of comedies in this list. Maybe I’m a miserable bastard with no sense of humour or maybe these films are just flat out shit. The celebrity infested sequel to Zoolander tops the list of the worst sequel of the year, but it isn’t quite the worst film of the year.

Ben Stiller, who is normally a competent director, drops the ball here as he fails to deliver any laughs in his performance as the dim-witted Derek Zoolander and in his laugh free script (which he co-wrote with four other writers). Lacking in imagination, full of boring celeb cameos (though no different to the first film to be fair) and completely laugh free, Zoolander 2 is not a biting satire on the fashion industry.

3. The Do over

It’s not really surprising to see Adam Sandler make an appearance on a worst of the year list and he stars on this list with his Netflix produced comedy The Do-over. I may have laughed once during the film, that was the scene where Max Kessler shoots a flare gun at a group of bikini glad girls who were laughing at his mate’s penis. I then felt bad at laughing at this because every depiction of a female character was problematic, they’re either whores or crazy ex-girlfriends.

Again the film has that raunchy scene that tries to out do the others, it loses unsurprisingly. The general consensus is that’s better than The Ridiculous Six but this year its the worst comedy produced by Netflix in a rather unsteller 2016 for Nexflix produced comedy feature films.

2. Dirty Grandpa

The sight of Robert De Niro masturbating isn’t one everyone was wanting to see, but it’s the sight we had the privilege to see early on in the awful Dirty Grandpa. I suppose its ok for De Niro to do whatever he wants considering his body of work, but I wished he’d stop doing crap like this. It’s rude, it’s crude, it’s without heart and its completely without merit.

I would think such comedies are going out of fashion with each of them trying to out do each other with the most raunchy scene (that was won by Sasha Baron Cohen’s Grimsby) but the Box Office proceeds for Dirty Grandpa (over 100 million against an 11 million budget) suggest otherwise. It’s dreadful.

1. Exposed

The worst film of the year is Declan Dale’s Exposed, well I say it’s Declan Dale’s Exposed but Declan Dale the film director doesn’t actually exist, it’s a false name much like Alan Smithee. The actual director Gee Malik Linton had what, on paper, seemed an interesting film as the original cut of the film focused on sexual abuse, violence against women, mass incarceration, and police brutality.

Instead Liongate got their mits on it and edited the film so that Keanu Reeves got more attention than he did in the original cut, showing that Lionsgate care little for artistic talent, but only care for the big bucks. The end result was a confusing, offensive mess where a serious subject matter was relegated to the background whilst the film focused on a badly developed plot where a detective tries to find who killed his partner.

Salon have accused Lionsgate of whitewashing the film as it focuses more on Reeves and his quest to find the cause of his partner’s death. What ever Lionsgate aims were they turned a potentially interesting movie into one of the messiest, incomprehensible films I’ve seen in a long time.