The Worst Movies of the Decade

by Andrew Osborne

Last week, I posted my picks for the worst movies I didn’t see in the first decade of the 21st century, and now it’s time for the most horrible cinematic experiences I actually experienced.

When I get around to writing my year-end Top Ten list, my pick for Worst Film of 2009 will almost certainly be My Suicide, a vapid, self-absorbed “black comedy” I saw at SXSW in March — though, to be honest, I feel a little bad about trashing a low-budget, little-seen indie which, ironically, was one of David Carradine’s last…uh…17 films.  

But, as for the rest of the decade…

2008 – Patti Smith:  Dream of Life

To be fair, I’m not a rabid Patti Smith fan…though I’ve seen films about musicians I knew far less well that I enjoyed a whole lot more.  Heck, I’ve seen military training films about the dangers of venereal disease that I enjoyed more — at least U.S.S. VD:  Ship of Shame had some kind of organizing principle, whereas Steven Sebring’s endlessly meandering documentary is the cinematic equivalent of watching someone update their Facebook page for an hour and a half.  But wait, you’re thinking, could the painfully earnest Dream of Life really be worse than Shia the Boof swinging through the trees with those ridiculous CGI monkeys in the execrable Indiana Jones & The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull?  Remarkably, yes — Spielberg’s exhausted, cynical sequel at least had Karen Allen and didn’t make me feel like I was mainlining Nyquil.

2007 – Premonition

So bad I actually use this one in my online UCLA Extension screenwriting class as an example of how NOT to write a movie.  To wit:  “If a character’s motivations don’t make sense in a scene, it’s usually because their arc is flawed, unclear or inconsistent.  In the 2007 supernatural thriller Premonition, for example, Sandra Bullock plays a woman who somehow gets out of synch with time.  One day she wakes up and her husband is dead.  The next day she wakes up and he’s alive.  Eventually, she concludes that she’s experiencing the days of one particularly fateful week out of order…yet even after this realization, she still has trouble keeping the days straight because she never thinks to buy, say, a watch with a calendar function.  Why?  Because if she did, it would disrupt the lazy plotting of the screenplay.  Bullock’s character is meant to be an intelligent suburban housewife…but in this case, character consistency was subordinated to the demands of a badly structured plot…not that audiences seemed to mind, given Premonition’s relatively strong box office.  Yet, for the sake of argument, let’s presume that a clear, well-constructed script with characters who behave in comprehensible ways is generally preferable to a random, confusing muddle!”

2006 – Flightplan

The worst full-length movie I saw in 2006 was actually this 2005 release, which stank up my Netflix queue with a moronic plot that some lazy Hollywood writers no doubt sold for way too much money, some overpaid industry suits greenlit (instead of something that actually made sense) and some overpaid director and movie stars (including Jodie Foster and Peter Sarsgaard, who should know better) didn’t bother to improve.  Shouldn’t people who get paid so much actually be good at their jobs?  The question, of course, is rhetorical.

2005 – Last Days

It’s not that I just outright hate Gus Van Sant’s “slow” period.  I thought Gerry was a funny then terrifying desert variation of The Blair Witch Project and I “got” Elephant (even if I didn’t particularly enjoy it), but really, Gus…how long do you honestly expect me to sit around watching a bad actor mumble and eat corn flakes?  And how long are critics going to keep falling for this crap?  If I trained my camera on an actor playing a dying man in a hospital bed and just watched him lying there and dying for 90 minutes in real time, it wouldn’t be a gripping study of mortality or an indictment of the impersonal nature of hospital care or anything else.  It would just be lazy filmmaking masquerading as too-cool-for-school “art.”  And you know what else?  It would be INCREDIBLY, INCREDIBLY BORING, just like this fiasco of utterly self-indulgent nonsense. 

2004 – Spartan

Whenever I spend any length of time in the Lone Star State with esteemed movie critic, Scott Von Doviak, I usually wind up tagging along to free screenings of some of the worst crap Hollywood can scrape from the bottom of its bottomless barrel.  In 2004, however, I didn’t attend a single critic’s screening and thus missed a lot of the year’s crappiest crap…which means I actually had to PAY to see Bridget Jones:  The Edge of Reason (it was a sequel, nothing else was playing, I knew what I was in for, but still…) and Spartan.  I  can’t possibly imagine what the usually entertaining (or at least interesting) David Mamet thought he was doing with this pretentious, humorless, predictable mess of “hard-boiled” cliches from Tom Clancy’s reject pile (and that’s a pretty stinky pile)…but I sure hope he’s gotten it all out of his system, whatever it was.

2003 – 21 Grams

Alejandro González Iñárritu’s debut film Amores Perros was a bleak yet thrilling movie that played with chronology to build suspense while disrupting traditional notions of fate and narrative.  His follow-up was a pointlessly bleak study of Sean Penn’s hair, Benicio del Toro’s fake tattoos and Naomi Watts’ startling nipples which played with chronology to confuse, then bore the audience with endless repetitions and reorderings of meaningless events surrounding a hit and run accident, a hokey heart transplant metaphor and the ultimate unveiling of the aforementioned startling nipples.

2002 – Cherish

Although Men In Black 2 was equally painful, cynical, boring and pointless (with the exception of one hysterically stupid joke about testicles), Cherish was marginally more depressing for what it said about the state of 21st century “independent” film in these United States.  Whereas MIB:2 was the sequel to a big Hollywood money machine (and therefore, I should’ve known better than to expect anything more than recycled, predigested crap), Cherish was praised by some ”alternative” critics for nothing more than its pandering “hipness” (despite its blatantly high concept “Please hire me to direct your next Sandra Bullock vehicle” premise, by-the-numbers screenplay and bland, incoherent execution).  In fact, the only thing “indie” about the production was its ugly cinematography, spotty acting and thoroughly amateurish direction. 

Runner Up:  Life Or Something Like It, Angelina Jolie’s jaw-droppingly inept, fake and utterly wrong-headed attempt at life-affirming “depth,” which at least had the decency to be a critical and commercial failure.

 2001 – The Mexican

Many bad movies are dull, annoying and profoundly unentertaining, but the truly heinous ones go that extra mile into the realm of the downright philsophically offensive.  I’m not exactly a P.C. kind of guy, but this was easily the most racist mainstream flick I’d seen since The Phantom Menace…and that wasn’t even the worst part.  What the hell were big shots like Julia, Brad and Tony Soprano doing in this crap?  These people make zillions of dollars!  They can make or break a project…and they chose to do THIS?  It’s not even a near miss, but awful in every way, like a surgeon missing your brain tumor entirely and removing your foot.

2000 – Reindeer Games/Dancer in the Dark

Oh, sure, Requiem for a Dream and Blair Witch 2 were both awful in their respective ways, but at least they were TRYING to do something, whereas Reindeer Games infuriated me for being so aggressively lazy and mediocre.  Yet, while the bottom-feeding Ben Affleck vehicle was technically the worst film I saw in 2000, the single worst film-going experience of the year was Dancer In The Dark, a typically unpleasant exercise from the master of pointless sadism, Lars Von Trier.  Indeed, the gruesomely unpleasant execution scene at the end of the film was so excruciatingly painful to watch that I felt like I’d been punched in the ribcage and was furious afterwards.  Which is not to say Dancer is a bad movie, exactly.  Which is not to say it’s a good movie, either.  I have to give a certain amount of respect to a work of art which produces such a visceral reaction in me — but, then again, I had a similar reaction to the infamous bootleg videotape of the politician who inspired the song “Hey Man, Nice Shot” actually shooting himself in the head at a press conference.  Like somebody said once, it’s easy to get a reaction out of an audience:  just strangle a puppy.  But that don’t necessarily make the result worth seeing.