As awards season kicks on and praise is poured on the very best films of 2017, well, call us grouches – we felt like souring up the mood a little.
We’ve said it before: 2017 offered up a ton of great cinema (check out 15 great pictures you may have missed right HERE). BUT, there are some screen works that were downright stink bombs. From crappy horror remakes/sequels, to more regurgitation from Michael Bay, to seriously unfunny “comedies”, to Luc Besson showing off just how to waste millions; without further ado, here are our Worst Ten Movies of 2017. Oh, and we’ve added 10 Dishonourable Mentions that should you steer clear of as well.
‘JIGSAW’:
Sure, there’s blood, violence, gore, clues and red herrings flying all over the place, but it’s all so formulaic and familiar ““ to the point of déjàvu ““ that it is hard to draw much from them in any constructive or significant way.
‘THE SNOWMAN’:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=1&v=0pIRC4fflgM
There’s a solid cast and some talented names behind the camera, but it doesn’t work. Don’t bother; you’ll have zoned out long before the almost laughably lame final showdown comes around, which is before the tacked-on sequel opener, mind you. Yes, The Snowman is quite a disappointment.
‘FLATLINERS’:
What we have here is a yawn-worthy, frustratingly insipid redo with a few uninteresting character tweaks… What we’re left with is eyerollingly contrived, utterly formulaic and something that looks just like every other run-of-the-mill supernatural horror movie from the past decade.
‘AMERICAN ASSASSIN’:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=35&v=jLBva1_oyzc
Aside from the confronting opening sequence, the film lacks any form of emotional anchor and offers no dramatic filler to bind the story together. And so we’re left with a bunch of simplistic characters that just want to kick ass for America, accompanied by a bunch of bloated action sequences that may as well have been collected from Roland Emmerich’s cutting-room floor.
‘VALERIAN AND THE CITY OF A THOUSAND PLANETS’:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=11&v=b1Ltv_a-tws
Uncharismatic leads, an overindulgence and saturation of visual effects, a convoluted mess of concepts. Luc Besson’s Valerian and the City of A Thousand Planets is an exceptional piece of shit.
‘TRANSFORMERS: THE LAST KNIGHT’:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_UoFU8_nHXs
This franchise has been a mess for a few movies now, but Transformers: The Last Knight is the most blatant example of how little care the series has in actually telling a story. It gets an extra point for the thrill of seeing Anthony Hopkins in such a strange light, but that’s nowhere near to recommend this indulgent, patronising mess.
‘SNATCHED’:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=70&v=dVOtwKXTF_k
The whole thing reeks of a painful indifference. Start to finish (which feels like quite a long time for a 90-minute movie), you can’t shake the feeling that nobody involved wanted anything more than to rush this through so they could move on with their lives. The best thing to say about Snatched is that if you do decide to take your mother to see it, she’ll probably be too polite to say how little she cared for it.
‘A FEW LESS MEN’:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=6&v=WRF12GtEvwM
A Few Less Men marks a new low point for Australian comedy. a mish-mash of randomly selected scenarios that have been stitched together to fulfil some misguided quota of vulgarity, rather than to serve as a means of story and character progression.
‘ALL EYEZ ON ME’:
Scene after scene of awkwardly handled staging and performances, and deeply inconsistent pacing. Countless sequences begin and end clumsily, with the tiniest of plot points left dangling so that the next scene has something to follow on from. All Eyez on Me is an unsatisfactory film no matter how you look at it. When you consider how long it took for us to get a film focused on Tupac Shakur, it’s downright disappointing. At least the artist’s music is blasted, often, although that will mean little to those who aren’t fans of his music.
‘DEATH NOTE’:
The script seems to jump from beat to beat with flimsy character motivations fueling it all. It’s just messy. The concept is better suited to be, at the very least, a trilogy. As someone who isn’t well versed with the original source material, I cannot imagine how the true fans are feeling about this.
DISHONOURABLE MENTIONS:
- ‘THE ONLY LIVING BOY IN NEW YORK’
- ‘SUBURBICON’
- ‘GEOSTORM’
- ‘WAR MACHINE’
- ‘ALIEN: COVENANT’
- ‘BERLIN SYNDROME’
- ‘RIP TIDE’
- ‘THE MEYEROWITZ STORIES’
- ‘1922’
- ‘THE VAULT’
