The Worst Films of 2013

After a rough start, 2013 turned into a terrific year for movies. My top ten list will go up around Friday, and it probably will not be finalized until seconds before it posts. Normally by this point I've decided on a rock solid number one, but this year I'll probably end up flipping a coin to decide between three fantastic choices. My life is hard, guys. Much less stressful has been creating my annual list of the worst films of the year, and I have five fine selections here to show you just how bad things get even in the best of years. Also, after there was no recipient last year, 2013 sees the return of the Last Airbender Memorial Award for Special Achievement in Terribleness. That will come at the end. First, here are my picks for the five worst movies to be released in the last 12 months. Enjoy, and avoid them at all costs.

5.

Kick-Ass 2

The original Kick-Ass wasn’t anything special, but it did have a certain bawdy charm that made it a fun, albeit mostly bogus, experience. The sequel, directed by Jeff Wadlow, is all bogus and no charm. If a film is going to be an ultraviolent toilet humor fest one second and then ask the audience to sympathize with these horrible characters the next, it’s going to have to be done with a lot more tact than this. At one point, there is a failed rape scene which is played for laughs, and then two seconds later the intended victim is beaten to a pulp. Apparently this is supposed to be “fun.” Perhaps I’m giving the original Kick-Ass too much credit, but I don’t recall it being half as tone deaf as this monstrosity.

4.

Grudge Match

To call Grudge Match half-baked would be an insult to half-baked things, considering it’s simply an exercise in stunt casting that strings the easiest possible gags together and calls itself a movie. There was an opportunity here to make a comedy that celebrated the careers of Robert De Niro and Sylvester Stallone, but instead it resorts to multiple jokes about a character named B.J., and Stallone spends a few seconds soaking his hands in horse urine. Whenever the two stars are on the screen, it feels like a hostage situation, and the only signs of life occur when Kevin Hart shows up to do his usual thing. Even those scenes are fairly obvious, but at least they have some energy. Everyone else seems like they’re waiting for this torture to end.

3.

The Family

This was not exactly a banner year for Robert De Niro, and he’s had his fair share of stinkers in the last several years. But 2013 brought us the following disappointments: The Big Wedding, Killing Season, Last Vegas, the aforementioned Grudge Match, and Luc Besson’s clueless The Family. Here is a mob comedy (?) featuring the dumbest, broadest characters possible, stupefying scenes of oddly tasteless violence, and enough tonal inconsistencies to make the aforementioned Kick-Ass 2 look like a day at the spa. Just about every character in this thing attacks or kills somebody for no real reason, but it’s all excused because they used to be in the mafia so har har har. This might have worked if Besson went all the way and made it an over-the-top cartoon, but he has no idea what this film is trying to say or be. The Family is terrible because it doesn’t realize just how profoundly dumb it is.

2.

A Good Day to Die Hard

Through four installments, the Die Hard films had been holding up relatively well, even though the John McClane of Live Free or Die Hard barely resembled the character we all learned to love from the original. Now, in A Good Day to Die Hard, McClane is barely a character at all. He is just an indestructible bald guy who keeps getting attacked by various Russian baddies, only now he has his secret agent son alongside. This is as incomprehensible and boring an action film as has ever been made, and McClane spends much of the running time shouting about how he is supposed to be on vacation, which ISN’T EVEN TRUE THIS TIME. If you were to tell me that the filmmakers had never seen a Die Hard film before, I’d believe it. Or any good action movie, for that matter.

1.

Machete Kills

Robert Rodriguez could never really be described as a “master director,” but it’s quite shocking to see him regressing with each year as opposed to evolving. The first Machete was passable junk entertainment, but Machete Kills would fail as any kind of entertainment. The plot is this: Danny Trejo scowls for few minutes, kills some nameless bad guy, a celebrity pops in for an unfunny cameo, repeat. It’s disheartening that any filmmaker would spend valuable time on a movie like this, and it’s even more disheartening that Rodriguez shows no signs of going off this course. The only thing worth dissecting here is the casting of Alexa Vega. At one point, Rodriguez directed her as a 13-year-old in Spy Kids. Now he is sexualizing her like crazy in Machete Kills. The circle of life!

The Second Winner of the Last Airbender Memorial Award for Special Achievement in Terribleness:

Making a modern sketch movie is not an inherently bad idea, but how that idea resulted in the hot mess of Movie 43 is beyond baffling. No doubt the result of multiple kidnappings and blackmail, the film begins with a scene in which Academy Award nominee Hugh Jackman wears a prosthetic chin scrotum on a date with Academy Award winner Kate Winslet. At one point Chris Pratt is hit by a car and defecates instantly. Gerard Butler plays a leprechaun who beats up Johnny Knoxville and Seann William Scott. It should be noted that these sentences aren’t just vague descriptions of the sketches. In almost every case, those descriptions are as far as the jokes go. Movie 43’s existence is one of the great cinematic mysteries of our time, and that is what earns it the second Last Airbender Memorial Award. Congrats to all, and see you next year.

A few honorable mentions, in alphabetical order:

21 And Over: The writers of The Hangover start directing, and let’s just say I'm starting to get serious doubts about their range.

Gangster Squad: At one point people thought this would be a prestige picture. Instead it was two hours of Ruben Fleischer doing lame gangster movie karaoke.

The Hangover: Part III: A truly depressing, humorless end to a trilogy nobody needed. These sequels did not expand on the original. They poisoned it.

Jobs: Ashton Kutcher’s performance as Steve Jobs was not what killed this movie. That it feels like a filmed Wikipedia page is far more unforgivable.

Olympus Has Fallen: Inexplicably made more money than Roland Emmerich’s superior White House Down, which had the distinct advantage of actually being, you know, fun.

Salinger: Never has a documentary this minor had a higher opinion of itself. Shane Salerno thinks he is doing Important Work, but that couldn’t be farther from the truth.

Okay, that about does it. See you all at the end of the week, when my list of the best films of 2013 shall be revealed! Try to control your excitement.