I don’t like trashing movies. I really don’t. By and large, Hollywood is a place where people love movies and are doing their best to make good ones. “Nobody sets out to make a piece of shit,” some producer once said. And so you don’t want to trash someone who tried like hell and just couldn’t get it poppin. However, there are instances where people who don’t value the opportunity they’ve been given get to make films, or times where ego dictates a film getting made, or where the almighty dollar becomes more important to the studio than making a good movie. And in those cases, I think it’s okay to call the movie out. Almost every movie on my Worst Of List falls into one of these three categories. So yeah, I’m going to vent a little bit here. But in order to give the post some value, I’ll throw in a few screenwriting lessons along the way. Let’s get started, shall we?
10) Jupiter Ascending – Calling the Wachowskis misguided at this point doesn’t do their status justice. Sure, the two are the original imagine dragons and they possess spoon-bending directing skills. But they’re stuck in “M. Night Shalaman Land,” unable to realize how badly their writing is screwing up their movies. Jupiter Ascending is a classic case of writers trying to cram way too much story into their script. George Lucas had to come to terms with this with the original Star Wars, which was supposed to have most of the stuff that ended up in Empire and Jedi. He finally relented, realizing it was too much story to tell, and focused on a more contained version of the story (by the way, there isn’t a sci-fi adventure script I’ve read that didn’t have too much story in its first few drafts). What that script gained in the process was urgency – becoming one of the greatest chase films of all time. Jupiter Ascending, with its bulky and bloated plotting, was the antithesis of this, a lumbering leviathan, and a lesson to all aspiring screenwriters to KEEP YOUR STORIES LEAN!
9) Knock Knock – Maybe it’s serendipitous that our number nine slot involves the actor who helped bring the Wachowskis into the public spotlight. This one really hurts though. For like two seconds, Keanu Reeves was cool again. John Wick brought the “Whoa” back. Which meant we could look forward to a Keanu who would receive better scripts, get better offers, and reclaim his spot on the A-list. Except Knock Knock. Who’s there? Eli Roth. If there is a working director with a bigger name who is less talented than Eli Roth, I’d like to know who he is. Knock Knock takes a somewhat interesting premise – a married man who lets two stranded trouble-making teens into his home while his family is out of town – then writes half a screenplay out of it. That’s right. Knock Knock runs out of story 60 minutes through. The whole idea with a premise like this is you make it a one-night ordeal – a series of escalating problems that climax before daylight. Yet Roth and his writing crew inexplicably send the girls home the next morning, only to have them show up a day later to, I guess, inflict more pain on Keanu. Except by that point, ALL THE TENSION IS GONE, leaving us confused as to what the point of the story was anymore. The screenwriting tip on this one is pretty obvious. Once all the air is let out of the balloon, you can’t blow it back up again.
8) Man From U.N.C.L.E. – This was the most bizarre movie experience I had all year. I have never seen a movie with more beautiful cinematography and more talented directing come across so dead on the screen. It didn’t help that everybody in the film looked like they’d just smoked a pound of herb! Oh, and that Henry Cavill and Armie Hammer have the collective personality quotient of a monk at a hospice center. Luckily, not many people had to suffer from these performances since THIS MOVIE HAD THE WORST TITLE OF THE DECADE and therefore NO ONE SHOWED UP!!!! Okay, just work with me for a second on this. You’re John Smith living in Minnesota and you want to see a movie this weekend. I tell you the movie, “Man from U.N.C.L.E.” is playing. What do you think the chances are of him having any idea what the movie is about from that title? I’ll give you a hint. NEGATIVE 9 BILLION PERCENT! But for shits and giggles, let’s let him watch the trailer. That should make things clearer right? Um… sorta? It seems to be a buddy cop movie set in the 1960s? And one of the guys is Russian (when has a movie that featured a Russian accent in one of the main roles EVER done well in America????)? And they’re trying to stop something? And what do you tell your friend John when he asks why “uncle” has a bunch of periods inserted into it? I have no idea why anybody thought this movie had a Jawa’s chance in the Sarlac Pitt of doing well. Screenwriting lesson: Make sure your title helps sell your movie!
7) Entourage – This one seems like easy pickens. But it’s on the list because it’s bad in a way that none of the other movies are bad. It’s bad because it’s empty. More than all of the other entries, Entourage has the least story to tell. Indeed, when the end credits roll, it seems like we’ve been watching for 30 minutes. Vince (the lead character) directing a movie is supposed to be the “big hook” that makes this Entourage story worthy of feature-status. But Entourage the Movie is an example of why some stories are best kept on the small screen. Entourage has always been about the dialogue and the interaction between its lively group of characters. What it never purported to have was STAKES. You never felt like if the characters failed that anything bad would happen to them. And since movies are one event (as opposed to 100), the stakes need to be giant in them. Since Entourage had never operated in that arena before, it didn’t know what to do when given that mandate. And, oh yeah, since we were talking about Mary Sues the other day, isn’t Vince the biggest Mary Sue in the history of television? No movie felt like it had robbed me of my money more than this one.
6) Mississippi Grind – No film implored me to want to scrape my eyeballs out with rusty sporks in 2015 more than Mississippi Freaking Grind. I consider the hack that got Mississippi Grind made one of the industries biggest issues, and a loophole that bad writer/directors will continue to exploit if financiers don’t stop funding these. Basically, what you do is you write a non-story that centers around two miserable characters. Actors love playing miserable characters! So even though the story sucks balls, they sign on. And once you have known actors, you can get funding. And hence Mississippi Grind gets made. But the ridiculousness doesn’t stop there. Critics typically give these movies high marks because they’re different from Hollywood flicks and there’s at least one good performance. These factors help mask the fact that movies like Mississippi Grind are absolutely awful. Nothing happens in this fucking movie!!!! Two people gamble and talk and wallow in misery. FOR FUCKING TWO HOURS!!!!! There is never a point to any of it. These self-indulgent pretentious exercises in filmmaker masturbation do nothing other than convince a few poor souls to mistakenly lay down $5.99 for an Itunes rental. A mistake, I’m ashamed to admit, I made. I should’ve known better.
5) Fantastic Four – I know. Another gimme. We all heard about what happened. The director stayed in his trailer half the shoot, preferring to snort lines instead of help his actors read them. He’d get kicked off directing duties for a future Star Wars movie as a result (thank God!). They needed to bring in other directors to try and save the film. It was a mess. But movies have been saved from doom before. Maybe Fantastic Four could do the same? I’m afraid not, my friends. My best guess, from watching the film, is that the only stuff director Josh Trank shot before he went crazy was the first act. Because that’s all this movie is! One giant first act. I can’t tell you how many scenes there were of people in labs or on computers “researching things.” In a typical Hollywood blockbuster, those shots would’ve been relegated to a 60 second montage. Here they’re the main souce of plot for an entire hour! At a certain point it became a game of “How many computer generated DNA strands can characters look at in a single film?” Then, when we FINALLY get to the point where they go to the “other dimension” that they’ve spent 90 minutes researching, it’s a terribly composited incredibly ugly half-CGI empty moon-like surface. THIS IS WHAT WE’VE BEEN WAITING FOR THIS WHOLE TIME???? TO COME HERE??? This movie probably would’ve finished higher on this list if I didn’t feel so bad for all the people who had to work on it.
4) Terminator: Genisys – Here’s some advice for Hollywood studios. Do not, under any circumstances, deliberately spell a word wrong in your sci-fi title. It is a guarantee that your movie will suck. I’m serious. Star Wars was not spelled, “Star Warz.” Or “Starr Worrz.” Is there any person on this planet who didn’t know this movie was going to be terrible as soon as they saw this misspelled title? And yet still, after lowering the bar that much, Terminator: Genisys still somehow managed to disappoint us. As I’ve always said on this site, if you’re going to do time travel, KEEP IT SIMPLE. Time travel is inherently confusing. Trying to mash multiple time-jumping storylines together is a recipe for movie suckage. To me though, it comes down to this director. Here’s a guy who took one of the most iconic scenes in science-fiction history, the naked Terminator walking up to a gang of punks and demanding their clothes, and changed the haircuts of the punks (from blue spiked hair to black normal hair and from a short cut to a green mohawk) because he “felt like it.” Any director who doesn’t understand why you don’t change the hair of the characters in that scene SHOULDN’T BE ALLOWED TO FUCKING DIRECT THE MOVIE. What’s interesting about this film is that it was casting at the exact same time as The Force Awakens, and each production was fighting over the same actors. I can only imagine if JJ Abrams would’ve brought Emilia Clarke into the Star Wars universe. His pitch would’ve been so simple: “Come with me if you want your career to live.”
3) American Ultra – American Ultra puts every rant Max Landis has made on Youtube and Twitter into question. If he thinks this movie is good writing? I don’t think you can trust anything the guy says, whether it be about Mary Sues or lookie loos or piles of doo-doos. I can’t remember the last time a movie has made me hate its main characters so quickly. Our “hero” is a loser who smokes pot all day (why do I get the feeling this “trait” was based off of someone the writer knew?), refuses to do anything, doesn’t try to make his life better, whines all the time, and is generally a miserable worthless human being who has no interest in bettering his life. His girlfriend isn’t much better. She ALSO smokes pot all day, stays in like her boyfriend, gets pissed when her boyfriend doesn’t want to do anything, and is generally a humorless annoying excuse for a human being. THESE ARE OUR HEROES!!!!! What Max Landis doesn’t realize is that nothing he writes after he’s introduced us to these two people matters. It doesn’t matter if our protagonist all of a sudden gains Jason Bourne like powers. BECAUSE WE HATE HIM! A script can recover from a morally questionable character introduction. But it CANNOT RECOVER from a character the audience detests to the very core. But even if Landis managed to get that right, this is still a confused premise that’s only celebrated at 3 in the morning after everyone’s too trashed and too high to know a good idea from a bad one. “Like, he’s a stoner, who’s also, like, Jason Bourne. Wouldn’t that be awesome?” “Yeah dude. Max, you should totally write that.” “I can probably belt out a first draft by breakfast.” “Can I play the dealer?”
2) Aloha – This is the most significant of the movies I’ve put on this list because when I first reviewed this script, which was beyond awful, I got a call from one of the producers of the film chastising me for reviewing an early draft of the script (strangely enough, I kid you not, the final draft of the script added a major villain character named, “Carson”). Yet I knew, just knew, that there was no way this could ever become a good script. And it wasn’t because of the writer. This is Cameron fucking Crowe we’re talking about here, writer of Jerry Maguire and Say Anything! But the premise was so confused, so unsure of itself, that rewriting it was be akin to reorganizing the sheet music on a Nickleback song. Let this be a warning to all of you that if your concept is flawed from the beginning, there’s no way to save it. You can’t rewrite something that never had legs to stand on in the first place. And I know you’re all wondering, “How do you know if your concept is flawed?” There’s no universal answer to that other than GET FEEDBACK. If people look confused when you pitch them your idea? Or if you get a lot of polite observations that the concept is kind of hard to wrap their head around? That’s usually an indicator that your concept doesn’t work. In this case, it was that the concept was unfocused. There was no clear unifying idea, like in, say, Jerry Maguire: “A top sports agent must start back at the bottom after being excised from the biggest sports agency in the world.” What’s the unifying concept in Aloha? “A pilot comes to Hawaii to make sure a satellite launch goes well to stave off a rival Chinese company while rekindling two separate love interests and keeping the local Hawaiian government at bay?” I think some writers assume they can write their way out of a sloppy concept. It never happens.
1) Big Game – We’ll finish this list on a lighter note. I did not hate this movie. But it is unquestionably the worst movie of the year. The plot plays out like a bad 1980s Sylvester Stallone movie. The dialogue is so on-the-nose, you leave each line with a fresh blackhead. The characters are so over-the-top, you wonder how they keep climbing back onto your side. Just the premise alone – a stumbling-over-his-lines Samuel Jackson as president gets teamed with an Inuit boy who uses his hunting skills to help the president evade a Middle Eastern terrorist who doesn’t just want to kill the president, but hunt him down like a wild animal – is so bizarrely conceived you’re wondering if this is one of those MTV Movie Award comedy promos where someone’s decided to use the leftover footage and try and turn it into a feature. I was so fascinated by this awful collection of ideas, I went looking for more info on the film, and only then did the picture become clearer. The director is a Finnish guy from Helsinki who had, up until this point, only directed short films. I began to imagine a backstory for this man, one similar to the family in The Wolfpack, where he’d been chained to his bed-post growing up solely on a diet of cheesy 1980s action movies. What I’m about to say next is going to sound preposterous. But I swear to you I believe it’s true. I think this script was originally written in Finnish and the director simply put it through Google translate to get the script we see now. Like that’s how wonky this movie is. I cannot believe that this movie exists. I just can’t!
Tuesday is Best Movies of 2015!
Wednesday is Best Amateur Scripts of 2015!
