Mediaite’s Worst Films of 2011

Currently we are inundated with lists pronouncing the best cinematic offerings of the year, with every critics group, industry guild, and entertainment publication arguing for the merits of their chosen titles. Sometimes debates erupt between these institutions, backing their selections or denigrating those made by others. Less intense is the discussion of which were the most embarrassing, misguided, and culturally offensive movies foisted on audiences over the past calendar flip.

This is a more fertile area. While most everyone compiles their “10-Best”, the chore for this collection was narrowing things down to a mere twenty, such was the output of horrendous plotlines, productions, and performances. So instead of reading about a collection of awards-ripe releases you likely did not see, here you can wallow in the low-minded films that you quite possibly suffered through, or at least narrowly avoided throwing money towards last year.

Abduction: Taylor Lautner puts the “Ab” in “Abduction”! Not an actual tagline, mind you, but it could have been and few would have thought it curious. While he was drawing attention as an ensemble member in the teen-drama “Twilight” series (with half of his screen time spent as a werewolf) giving Lautner an entire movie to carry was a mistake — because this movie needed heavy lifting. The story has elements wholly stolen from films such as “Bourne Identity”, “Eagle Eye”, and numerous others, while mangling each of those pieces. The problems were blatant enough at times to distract from Lautner’s weak peerformance. And adding to the idiocy was this:despite the title not a single person is ever abducted.

— If Abercrombie and Fitch made movies, they would look something like “Abduction”.

Bill Gibron, FilmCritic.com

Alvin & The Chipmunks: Chipwrecked More of the bad puns, poor humor, forced pop-culture references, uninteresting storylines, and general sub-mediocrity expected in the series. For reasons never understood the studio hires out expensive vocal talent for the rodents (Amy Poehler, Christina Applegate, Anna Farris, Justin Long) only to manipulate their voices beyond recognition. That kind of illogic permeates this franchise. So bad is this property that the best thing you can say is at least this installment had less crotch and fecal matter gags.
— “Chipwrecked” is derivative and predictable and not for anyone who’d rather be watching Schindler’s List.

Graham Young, Birmingham Mail

Apollo 18 The faux-documentary-style is among the newer genres in film, and already among the most tired. The lure of organic images justifying the use of a tiny budget is too big to resist for many film makers. The problem here was shooting on the cheap tends to detract when you have a film centered on the space program. A horror film which supposedly explains why NASA suspended moon missions it turned out to be less engaging than the conspiracy nuts who claim we never went in the first place. The cruel irony is that while employing the “found-footage” technique this movie had very little in terms of content.
—This only goes to show that in space, no one can hear you yawn.

Neil Smith, Total Film

Bucky Larson: Born to be a Star A painfully humor-free comedy from Adam Sandler’s Happy Madison Production – and his pen (he has a co-writing credit). This surrounds the life of a ridiculously naïve guy who manages to wrangle a career in the porn industry, despite being blessed with a tiny brain, and tiny sex organ. I guess it could have been dubbed “Forrest Stump”. Nick Swardson actually uses a dumb-ass wig and buck teeth for comedy. It’s almost sad, if it wasn’t so pathetic. The histrionics and the “humor” are so infantile that you feel like this was created by a group of adolescents making sex jokes without ever having seen a Playboy magazine, let alone a porn film. Even the commercials were so unremittingly repellent you get the sense they were daring people to arrive at theaters.

—About as funny as the typical scribbling on a public bathroom stall.

Frank Scheck, Hollywood Reporter

Big Mommas: Like Father, Like Son While they stretched credulity in the first two films having an FBI agent go undercover as a corpulent black woman, this time Martin Lawrence and his stepson both have to don dresses to hide from murderers, and do so in an all girls school. Entirely plausible! Even if you could buy into a Federal agent needing to wear drag, why on Earth would he need to wear a full body fat suit, and then pose nude for an art class? (Better we don’t ask.) Some have commented it is now time for Lawrence to retire his mu-mu. Actually that time was prior to the first installment.

— Thanks a bunch, Tyler Perry. Your antics in old-lady dress-up have inspired Martin Lawrence to literally drag his worst franchise out of the closet.

-Luke Thompson, E! Online

The Change-Up Best friends each covet the life of the other, and serendipity leads to them swapping their bodies, and lives. Two comedically-gifted actors are mired in a script reliant on scatology and little wit. The soul exchange comes about from them pissing together into a wishing well, and it devolves from there. Diaper gags, toilet humor, and the men exposing themselves to children are passed off as entertainment. The obvious dismal results were telegraphed when during the press tour Jason Bateman and Ryan Reynolds stopped the usual stumping and openly admitted how bad things were on screen.
—Like the copious pooh that his baby son squirts into Bateman’s mouth during a nappy change, it leaves a bad taste in the mouth.

Phillip French, The Observer UK

Conan the Barbarian 3-D Lionsgate decided it would be a swell idea to go through with remaking an established franchise, tossing $90 million behind the project. So they cleverly chose a director known mostly for helming disappointing remakes, and the “Cher: Video Hits Collection”. Add to that the writing team behind dreck like “Sahara” and “Sound of Thunder”, and then choose Jason Momoa, a relative unknown piece of chunk-muscle from a few seasons of “Baywatch” to take on the title role. Very little surprise that it would become a mess and nobody would show up.

— The whole affair buries the needle on the stupid-meter, with pointless 3-D and a visual style about as subtle as the side of one of those old air-brushed conversion vans.

Corey Hall, Metro Times Detroit

Cowboys and Aliens This graphic novel adaptation was heavily hyped and had plenty of advance publicity (They promoted this title at the 2010 and 2011 ComicCon). However they managed the difficult feat to both disappoint the fanboys and fail at latching on with the general public. The melding of space aliens and the old west never occurred, the humor and drama and action never fit together, and stars Harrison Ford and Daniel Craig were so ineffectual that most people remarked about the work of Olivia Wilde. It would have been the bomb of Summer had “Green Lantern” not created a bigger crater.
— A phenomenally successful two-man war against narrative clarity and continuity.

Christopher Orr, The Atlantic

The Dilemma It speaks volumes that you begin with the teaming of Vince Vaughn and Kevin James, add a star cast, then have them all led by director Ron Howard, and the result gets dumped with a release into the January wasteland. The two leads are known comic actors, the plot occasionally seems comedic, yet throughout the film you shake your head and ask yourself “Wasn’t this supposed to be a comedy?” It isn’t that the jokes fail, it is that they do not exist. James is reduced to a straight man, and Vaughn – who finds his friend’s wife is cheating on him – essentially, becomes a stalker. To show how misguided this was Vaughn spends most of the time lying to everyone close to him, as he is on a quest to learn the truth.
— “The Dilemma” never stops being a movie, and never starts being a good one.

Richard Corliss, Time Magazine

Green Lantern The problems were evident when the first trailers leaked months before summer, and as Warner Brothers scrambled to fix things they seemed to only compound their errors. The story was obtuse, the film was chocked with CGI, Ryan Reynolds never really populated the character, and we have to believe Blake Lively is brilliant. In one grand scene a helicopter is crashing (for seemingly minutes) and of all the ways his ring could have been wielded to save the day he chooses to encapsulate the chopper inside a car and have it careen down a winding track to safety. You’d be a liar and a communist to imply that scene had anything to do with the cross-promotion the movie had with Hot-Wheels. This $200 million production had over $100 million additionally spent on marketing, and Warner Brothers barely made 1/3 of their investment back.
— We’re told at some point in “Green Lantern,” is the color of will. Based on the movie surrounding that line, it’s also the color of won’t.

Wesley Morris, Boston Globe

Hoodwinked Too: Hood Vs. Evil

Back in 2005 the Weinstein Company had one of their few successful releases in the animated fracturing of fairy tales. It was a sub-Pixar product, but it managed to turn a slight profit for the cash-starved company. That modest return led to this sequel which – though six years later – seemed to step back in terms of animation technology. Of course, they gave it the 3-D treatment, which only muddled the already unimpressive look. Add to that a frenetic story that was light on laughs and even lighter on logic and it seems certain a third iteration will not be seen.

— One of the more depressing, desensitizing experiences I’ve had in a theater — feels as computer-generated as its creepy, talking-ceramic-toy style of animation.

Michele Orange, The Village Voice.

Human Centipede 2 (Full Sequence) Give director Tom Mix credit for one thing; he can lock onto an artistic vision like a pit pull on a ham hock. Few, if any, would be inspired to delve into a fetishistic topic like the creation of a new creature by taking victims and sewing their mouths to another’s anus, but Mr. Six saw fit to use two films in his exploration of this perverse theorem. While these titles have generated an enormous amount of attention (this was banned in Britain before it was even completed) they have done little to generate money. Neither title received a release past a couple of dozen theaters, and combined they have earned less than $400,000. Anyone bemoaning the taste of moviegoers can take pleasure that nobody was the least bit interested in seeing this.

—A grubby hack job about a grubby whack-job, whacking off grubbily.

Matt Glasby, Total Film

I Don’t know How She Does It I’m not sure anyone was demanding a film centered on Sarah Jessica Parker slogging through the travails of motherhood. After becoming the embodiment of urban commercialism for years in “Sex and the City” shows and films she was completely miscast as an investment banker for whom we are supposed to have sympathy. Worse still was the movie presenting gender politics – trumpeting that a woman can be both successful and have a family – that were 50 years old as if they were an original thought. Add to that stay-at-home mothers are ridiculed, and males shown as boorish and oblivious, and you end up with something you would find on a faded VHS in a yard sale.
— Leaves you wondering why nobody involved with this film seems to have ever met an actual working mother.

Moira McDonald, Seattle Times

Jack & Jill How bad was Adam Sandler’s year of cultural atrocities? His deplorable “Just Go With It” was only the FOURTH offensive title his production company was involved in creating. This cross-dressing “comedy” was roundly reviled when the trailer came out, and then upon release it was found to have been even worse. Sandler operates from the belief audiences cannot get enough of him, so he populates two roles, and each is completely repellant. The script confuses contempt for comedy, slapstick for content, and toilet humor for wit. The only mirth comes as Al Pacino humiliates himself in a self-depricating role.
— Jack has to be an abrasive jerk to his sister so that, in the final act, he can learn his lesson and embrace his twin and, blah blah blah, fart joke.

Alonso Duralde, The Wrap

Red Riding Hood Director Catherine Hardwicke tries to distinguish herself from the “Twilight” series that she kicked off. Well, offering up a gothic teenaged-melodrama love triangle with werewolves is no way to do that; almost everyone pointed out how this was almost identical, yet more ludicrous, than that reviled series.
— The village looks like an Amish suburb of LA peopled by dentally-perfect specimens with Hollywood hair and rustic smocks by Donna Karan.

Tim Evans, Sky Movies

Rubber The movie is about Robert, abandoned in the desert and who suddenly discovers that he possesses terrifying telepathic powers that give him the ability to destroy anything he wishes without having to move. One more detail; Robert is an automobile tire. Yes, this film offers up a murderous car tire as the protagonist. Supposedly a meta commentary on the horror genre and movie audiences it is not as funny or interesting as it promises, and it fails as a cinematic curio as well. Like campiness, you cannot intentionally create a cult favorite – what you end up with mostly is an unwatchable mistake.
— A hipster movie, affectedly exhausted and cocksure with no justification for it. And like anything hipster, you sort of want to kick it in the teeth. Walter Chaw, Film Freak Central

Season of the Witch Nicolas Cage had a busy year. He was in a meandering mess (“Trespass”) and an intentionally pulpy actioner (“Drive Angry”), but neither sunk as low as this January release. This effects-laden, plot-leaden religious history action piece was harder to get through than a rain-soaked moor. Watching him, and co-star Ron Perlman, be presented as youthful crusaders decades younger than their birth certificates was also amusing.
— It’s “The Seventh Seal” meets “Get Him to the Greek” meets “Lord of the Rings” as if filtered through Uwe Boll’s hack-tastic brain. Jenn Yamato, Movies.com

Shark Night 3-D This intentionally tried to capture the magic of last year’s “Piranha” remake, all while either ignoring – or being ignorant of – the fact that film was roundly scorned by critics and ignored by audiences. Then they opted to tone down the bloody effects and removed nudity to earn a PG-13 rating. The result is more people hated this effort, and even fewer showed up.
– So predictable it doesn’t even look like much fun for the sharks; when they open wide, they might as well be yawning.

Adam Markovitz, Entertainment Weekly

Zookeeper Kevin James provided another weak effort this summer, a paltry comedic effort involving a man who is able to communicate with animals. This was supposed to be a dump-off release last fall, but rebooting the “Spiderman” franchise meant Sony had to fill that release date with this. Of note was the oppressive product placement, with not only a Nick Nolte-voiced gorilla being obsessed with eating at a TGI Fridays, but scenes actually played out inside one of the eating establishments. The story of an institution worker having his life changed when the denizens begin speaking to him was so derivative of “Night at the Museum” that Sony even copied that movie’s poster.
— I think there should be a subdivision of the ASPCA — American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Audiences.

Peter Rainer, Christian Science Monitor

Brad Slager writes about bad cinema in his “Island of Misfit Films” column at CHUD.com, and he is a standing member of The Golden Raspberry Foundation.

This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.