Ten Worst Films

Hollywood is a vicious, unforgiving place run by bean counters and little men in suits who don't have much interest in the films they're financing. Consequently the process of deciding which films to finance can be tricky. So here's what they do: They look at who's 'hot' and they decide they'll finance films with those people in them. Who was the hottest ticket in town when they were thinking about financing this film? George Clooney. Okay, so he's Batman. Who else was hot? Arnold Schwarzenegger...okay, he can be the villain Mr. Freeze; yeah, that'll be cool. And Uma Thurman...she was just in Pulp Fiction - she can be Poison Ivy. Joel Schumacher can direct it - he was a set designer you know - it'll look great; nice and colourful, just like the old TV series. Yeah...and best of all we can team up with McDonalds with all these action figures. And the lunch-boxes, and the back-packs and the T-Shirts and the cereals and the cookies and the soft drinks. How can we fail to make a fortune? Well I'll tell you how: You fail to make a fortune, indeed you lose a fortune, by paying these 'hot' actors so much that the budget spirals out of control. You double the budget in advertising costs and print productions to try and recoupe what you've shelled out before a foot of film was ever shot. You pay some hack a nominal fee to cobble together the script of doom because now you're worried about all this money just running through your fingers. And little do you realise, but all the 'hot' actors you've just blown you're budget on are all horribly miscast and are embarrassed to be in this 'sure-fire hit'. And it all shows in the final product. People can be stupid, there's no doubt about that, but nobody likes to be taken advantage of and they'll turn on you in a second if you try to so blatantly rip them off.

Oh, the folly of one man on a mission for what he believes. I'm not talking about the main character here; I'm talking about John Travolta and his continuing devotion to the church of Scientology - the new religion set up by L. Ron Hubbard, the author of the Battlefield Earth books. John must have thought he'd be giving the church a huge cash injection by having this film made. Unfortunately people only tend to go and see films they find entertaining and that don't make them seasick. This film fulfills neither criteria, as it's a muddled mess from start to finish, with very few shots on the horizontal, as in more traditional films. No, instead just about every shot is at a mad, skewed angle for no discernable reason whatsoever. Maybe it was so that the John Travolta gang of aliens looked bigger and scarier than looking at them straight on. Or maybe the cameramen all had inner ear infections - who knows? As for the story, well, I'd rather not go into that because I'll just get confused. This beats out 15 Minutes and Deep Blue Sea for stupidity - no mean feat - and so collects the award for Dumbest Movie of All Time. The things John Travolta's character does to solve the problems that face him are hilarious in their stupidity. I'm sure this movie will end up with some sort of cult status in the future due to it's sheer badness, and will make more money down the line, but it cost a pretty penny to make and it'll take a long time to break even, because the public at large turned their back on this dross in their droves.

There's a theme of dumbness running through this section - have you noticed? This one is brain-dead. This movie was concocted by unimaginative Hollywood chumps who don't know anything about what might be popular - they only know what's been popular in the past. You've got to wonder about the thinking that goes on in these movie executive's heads: That big shark in Jaws was scary - so we'll have more sharks; that'll be more scary. That shark in Jaws was pretty intelligent for a shark, and that was scary- so we'll make them super intelligent; that'll be more scary. The shark in Jaws was a big one and that was scary, so we'll make our sharks bigger and that'll be more scary. These guys only have enough imagination to make sequels, or movies that are just like older movies, but bigger, with more noise, more pyrotechnics. It's the American mentality of if it's good right now then if we make it bigger it'll be better. And it's that mentality that is the undoing of the majority of American films, because bigger is not necessarily better. Once you've seen a bunch of big explosions it's not really a thrill to see another no matter how big it is. And making the sharks smarter is not scarier; it's just dumb. If Hollywood continues to invest all it's time and money on building a bigger mousetrap then I'll continue turning to foreign films that have been invested with a bit of imagination, artistic integrity and creativity.

The depths that Robert DeNiro will sink to to fund that production company of his knows no bounds. The third dumbest movie in the world - behind Battlefield Earth and Deep Blue Sea - sees him star alongside Edward Burns who is just starting out on his journey to full-fledged woodentop status. There's a great deal of gratuitous violence and every cliche in the history of cinema pops up at some time in the movie. So all in all it's just a complete mess, and pretty objectionable along with it, what with all the racial stereotyping and insane amount of gunplay in crowded areas. But the crowning glory in all of this is the development of the Edward Burns character from by-the-book official at the start of the movie to screaming bonkers gun-toting nutjob at the end. Considering this is basically just a police procedural set in modern day New York I can't sress enough just how monumentally stupid it is.

I'm tempted to say I can sum up all that's wrong with this film in two words: Sofia Copolla. And that does go a long way to explain why this film sucks, but there's more to it than that. There's Andy Garcia for a start. But even those two factors don't explain why it's such a mess. I suspect the reason it's so bad is the reason a lot of films are so bad: Money. It seems to me that money was the sole reason for this film's existence, and that's never a good recipe for a creative artistic endeavour. The first two Godfather films are practically faultless - absolutely perfect filmmaking, and I think Francis Copolla, after doing nothing of note since, with the brilliant exception of Apocalypse Now, was thinking to himself, 'If I could just recapture some of the magic...I know! I'll do another Godfather film! It'll be brilliant! We'll make Michael repentant for all the terrible things he's done. He'll give all his ill-gotten gains to the catholic church and everything will be alright again! But oh, the church will be corrupt, and all the other families will gang up on him, and Andy Garcia will get all ambitious and need kept in check, and he'll fall in love with Sofia Copolla and...' blah blah blah. Well, no. The fact is it's all just a rehash of the first two films diluted to the nth degree. Everyone is just going through the motions and lots of the main stars look frankly uncomfortable in the face of it all. The finale at the opera house is shocking in it's blatant plagiarism of the finale of the other two films. Cynical.

The first MI was alright. Okay, the pulling-masks-of-someone-else's-face-off stuff was stupid, and the last scene in the channel tunnel was testosterone-fuelled nonsense, but the rest of the film was pretty well done. Not so with the sequel: This sucker has a bad story, bad acting, bad dialogue, bad action, a bad villain, bad love-interest. It's baaad. Looks alternately like an advert for aftershave, an advert for cars, and an advert for sunglasses. Thandi Newton deserves some sort of official recognition for her performance in this film which is just astonishingly painful.

Don't watch this film - especially if you suffer from epilepsy. I was convinced my eyes would start streaming blood after enduring this MTV style karaoke nightmare of a movie from the crazed Baz Luhrman. Baz seems unconvinced of the merits of a coherent script about the bohemian excesses of the Moulin Rouge in Paris at the turn of the century. Rather, he must reckon getting his actors to warble snippets of popular songs from the modern era back and forth at each other will suffice. The style of this movie can only be described as manic, and I for one found it to be irritating in the extreme. The camera bounces all over the place and the ultra-quick cuts and incessant zooms grate after about three minutes and it doesn't let up for almost the entire duration. Dreadful.

Where to begin? Well, Ben Affleck is the star, but we'll take it as given that his performance is as bad as we've come to expect. No matter. This is a Michael Bay film, and that means you can be sure of a few things: There will be a sappy stupid overblown love story between the male and female leads which will be based on nothing except looks, and have nothing to do with the main story. There'll be a red, white and blue streak of patriotism running through the whole enterprise like a giant freeway instead of a decent story. There will be gratuitous use of close-ups when there's something 'meaningful' happening. There will be many loud, no make that ear-shattering, explosions throughout the film at carefully spaced intervals, each one louder than the last, culminating in a set-piece of deafening explosions, co-ordinated gunfire, flying bodies, blubbering young women and syrupy music blaring just under the rumble of all the vehicles crashing and machinery piling up all around the cast. And that's all there'll be. If that sounds like your bag, then buckle up and enjoy Michael Bay's Pearl Harbor, and kiss any sense you had goodbye.

Ah, The Postman. What an important man he is in this ravaged post-apocalyptic mess. Delivering hope to the desperate and schmaltz to the needy. He's a hero you know. But there's a villain, and he's evil. And he hates our Kev the Postie because...umm, well, I'm not quite sure why he doesn't like our Kev, maybe just being evil is enough. Anyway, there's our Postman and he has to...you know, I really can't remember what his purpose was, other than to deliver letters to people. Surely that isn't it. That's not much to base a movie on; I must be missing something. Come to think of it I'm not sure what anyone was up to at any given time in the film: I was too busy trying to avoid swallowing my tongue. This is a really awful film. How anyone thought this was a good idea is beyond me. Tedious doesn't begin to describe the arduous task that greets the viewer who sits down to watch this film. The thing is that it is patently ridiculous, but clearly doesn't know it. Indeed, it thinks it has something very profound to say about the human condition. Of course it doesn't say anything about anything and just ends up being embarrassing. Po-faced nonsense.

You may think that there are worse movies than these, and you'd be right - there are thousands of movies out there and a very great many of them suck worse than these, but they don't have the might and money of Hollywood behind them. They don't have all the marketing men lavishing their attention on them so that every billboard you pass features their film. They're just trying to make the best film they can with the very limited resources they have. So they make a dud, and it loses a few hundred thousand dollars, or maybe it makes a few bucks despite being bad, because it cost so little to make - it's not that big of a deal. But these films I present to you as the worst films in recent memory all have one thing in common: They've been given every chance: They've had the biggest head-start over any struggling independant production there could possibly be. They've had every resource Hollywood can muster heaped on them. They feature the biggest stars in town; they have the best known directors in the business, and they have the biggest budgets around and yet they fail. They have no artistic merit. Most of them even failed at the one thing they were specifically designed to do; make money. And the galling thing is it was all such a calculated and cynical affair from the word go. So it's okay to despise these films. It's okay to laugh at them and deride them because they deserve everything they've got coming.