Review Of 2016: The 20 Worst Films I Saw In 2016

Posted on January 8, 2017

Next in my review of the year that was 2016 we come to the bottom of my own cinematic barrel, scraper in hand. A lot of people had the feeling that, in hindsight, 2016 was about as pleasant as being run over by a steamroller shortly after being mauled by a lion, but in film terms it was a pretty reasonable year. That doesn’t mean, though, that there weren’t a few absolute stinkers steaming up the place, and I had the privilege of seeing more of them than usual.

Normally I would pick ten films and call them the “least best”, rather than worst, but two things are different this year:

1. Now that I’m doing more radio reviewing I’ve been trying to see anything which made the box office top 10. This inevitably leads to me watching more terrible films than when I make selections purely on what I want to watch.
2. I’m calling them worst this year because they were all pretty terrible, I’m past the point of trying to be nice.

In some previous years, including last year, I haven’t even given a single 1/10 mark, my lowest possible mark. In 2016 I awarded two of them, as well as a record five 2/10s. We’re not even a week into 2017 and I’ve already seen a 2/10 film this year (well done, Assassin’s Creed, see you back here, same time, same place, next year).

So it seems only fair that, given I sat through proportionally more poor cinematic experiences this year, that I give you the benefit of my reviewing doubts and grumbles so that you can avoid these films in cinemas / on DVD / streaming / when they come on telly late at night in about six months.

So, these are the 20 films that provided me with the greatest desire to bash my head against the cinema armrest until I blacked out in the hopes of some blessed relief, from films I saw which had a cinema release between January 1st and December 31st, 2016. And some dishonourable mentions to some other 4/10 films which didn’t quite make the grade (in this case, a D+ grade rather than anything lower), which were: Robinson Crusoe, The Boss, Ben-Hur (2016), Keeping Up With The Joneses, My Big Fat Greek Wedding 2, Inferno, Alice Through The Looking Glass, Criminal, Warcraft: The Beginning and Allied. All had some redeeming feature or other which kept them out of this cesspool of movie drudgery and despair.

20. Passengers – 4/10

I make an odd feminist, given that I’ve been a man these past forty or so years, but I have to say that Passengers made me feel somewhat uncomfortable. While in real life, Jennifer Lawrence is likely to have taken home a pay cheque at least twice that of Chris Pratt, the film sets up a moral quandary which it pays the barest lip service to resolving and diminishes Lawrence’s character in the process. The script is on rails and is desperately predictable with precious little sense of actual drama, but it takes turns you don’t want it to and still plays out in obvious ways anyway. Jennifer Lawrence rightly felt violated by people looking at private pictures of her that were uploaded to the internet, but thanks to the treatment of her both as an actor and character, reduced to an objectified object of lust with weak principles, watching this film made me feel about as creepy.

19. Suicide Squad – 4/10

I actually had this film in my top trailer picks last year, under the title “Most Promising Trailer For Next Year If They Don’t Screw It Up.” The main issue seemed to be that, based on everyone loving the trailer when it was released and desperate to capture some good feedback after Batman Vs. Superman opened to scathing reviews, Warner Bros. decided to re-cut the entire film until it looked like one long trailer. It also managed to make most of its characters uninteresting, has logic gaps the size of the Grand Canyon, it fundamentally never explains why you’d assemble any of these people to take on any threat, never mind this one and it’s got a soundtrack that sounds like a bad compilation album from the Nineties. Jared Leto’s Joker was memorable, but for mainly the wrong reasons, and you have to feel sorry for Will Smith that he had to choose between this and Independence Day: Resurgence. Hobson’s choice might have been a better option.

18. London Has Fallen – 4/10

Sometimes you watch a film and you start to question how what you’re seeing unfold on screen ended up even being made. There were a few occasions when this happened to me during London has fallen: for example, during any of the thudduingly dull action sequences or when half of the Metropolitan Police and the Queen’s guards suddenly turn out to have been replaced by the bad guys. Gerard Butler had one funny line in the original, Olympus Has Fallen, and it seems this film felt that was a bar that shouldn’t be cleared under any circumstances.

17. Point Break – 4/10

I don’t really have much to say about this utterly witless, pointless, charisma-less, excitement less, brainless remake of the Keanu Reeves / Patrick Swayze classic, other than that I had to go for a poo about 45 minutes in, and I wish I’d stayed longer, rather than hurrying back to the film, duty bound as I felt to see as much of the film as possible. Sorry if that’s too much detail, and I apologise if I’ve made you think about excrement, but hopefully it’s an association you’ll retain whenever this film comes to mind again.

16. Dad’s Army – 4/10

I’ll be honest, Dad’s Army is one of those old TV series that I appreciate, rather than enjoy, although I retain a soft spot for it as John Le Mesurier lived out his final years just around the corner from me. This film did its absolute best to wash away any such goodwill: it’s like a tribute band that are fantastic look- and soundalikes but terrible musicians. The casting is impeccable, but it’s as if the creative talent involved felt that was enough, with comedy in shorter supply than butter and cheese during rationing. There’s no rhythm or humour to any of the comedy and attempts to introduce some gender balance to proceedings just end up widening the amount of cast members left with little of value to do.

15. Mike And Dave Need Wedding Dates – 3/10

If there were awards for miscasting, then whoever thought Anna Kendrick would make an ideal person to play one of two girls with an absence of morals should get at least a nomination. This desperate comedy stumbles around in the hope of running into some jokes, but this could have been tied to a bull at the front door of a china shop and never have come close to a piece of dinnerware. And if you think my analogies are tortuous, then I’ve given you some sense of what sitting through this was like for me.

14. Friend Request – 3/10

It’s haunted Facebook. At the point when they look at haunted source code, I stopped caring. The film I feel sorry for in this is 2014’s Unfriended, which was at least twice as enjoyable, but has been confused with this film to the extent that the Wikipedia page has a disambiguation at the top.

13. Allegiant – 3/10

When a studio starts a young adult franchise in the wake of The Hunger Games that’s due to run for four films, but after the third film decides it won’t even bother to release the last one in cinemas, there’s nothing we really need to say, is there? My only regret is watching the first two on Amazon Prime before seeing this at the cinema, and watching the train wreck unfold in what felt like real time.

12. The Forest – 3/10

It’s difficult to know exactly what The Forest it trying to be, although it should be to the regret of cast, crew and audience that one of those things isn’t “at least vaguely scary”. If you’re going to set a film in a real-life Japanese suicide forest (and annoy quite a few people into the bargain), you should be aiming for at least some level of creepiness. If you’re going to cast the wonderful Natalie Dormer to play two roles in your film, at least give her something good to do with one of them.

11. The Angry Birds Movie – 3/10

I try to go into every film I see with an open mind, so when I went to see the Angry Birds movie, I was prepared to give it a chance, especially when the credited writer (Jon Vitti) wrote some of my favourite episodes of the Simpsons, as well as shows from King Of The Hill to The Larry Sanders Show. I’ve played the game occasionally on my phone, and if you have you’ll know it’s a simple, disposable idea: birds try and demolish structures with pigs on them. Somehow this has been stretched out to over an hour and a half, following that simple structure so slavishly that any attempts at humour – and they are few and far between – are suffocated by disinterested voice acting and the film’s clumsy structure. Actually less fun than watching someone else play Angry Birds while sat opposite you on a train.

10. Blair Witch – 3/10

If ever a horror movie unleashed an actual monster, then it’s the flood of poor imitation found footage movies that have been unleashed over the decade and a half since The Blair Witch Project first popularised the genre. This wasn’t even announced as a Blair Witch movie at first, and it had a great pedigree (Adam Wingard and Simon Barrett, who gave us You’re Next and The Guest), but it seems to fatally misunderstand what made the original so effective. It’s a photocopy of an iconic horror, with added annoying characters but with the actual horror sucked out aside from one preposterous twist, and the end of the film’s attempt to differentiate from the crackly VHS of the original becomes nigh-on unwatchable.

9. Absolutely Fabulous: The Movie – 3/10

I was not a fan of the original series, having sat stony faced through episodes while both my sister and the ex-Mrs Evangelist watched it during its various runs on the BBC. So chances are it was never going to set my wheels on fire. But, more fool me, I actually paid to go and watch this in more comfy seats rather than a standard cinema in an attempt to cushion the blow. Simply having has-been and would-be celebrities pop up in gratuitous cameos and pushing Kate Moss off a wall were never likely to be enough, but the attempts at plot – including Patsy’s bizarre gender-swapping, cash-grabbing marriage – are thin as a supermodel and three times as bizarre.

8. Batman vs. Superman: Dawn Of Justice – 3/10

Dear Hollywood, you’ve been making superhero movies in large quantities for most of this century. There have been some great successes, some iconic new characters, but there were only three that mattered to me as a child, and there are still only three that I truly care about their representation on film. It looks like Marvel are getting Spider-Man right now, so I’ll be keeping my fingers crossed so tightly it cuts the blood supply off that when Justice League arrives in November, it manages to sort out the other two.

It gives me no pleasure at all to see Batman Vs Superman sink this low, but the film is a mess in ways almost too numerous to list. But I feel the need to try, in the critical hope that the DC Extended Universe can stop making these films so wretched.

• The plot is a complete nonsense, a paradox of muddied complexity and childish simplicity that feels like cut-outs from a dozen fan-fictions stapled together
• The characters are totally wrong: Batman is arrogant and stupid, while Superman is self-absorbed and careless. If you’re going to keep repeating their cinematic portrayals, you need to vary them up, but not to the point where they’re both unrecognisable as those characters and also verging on repellent to watch
• Decent, compelling villains are required, as the pitching together of Earth’s mightiest heroes never convinces and Jesse Eisenberg’s performance is horrible
• I wasn’t as won over as some by Ben Affleck’s performance as Batman, but I think he’s got more chance of being interesting in future films than Henry Cavill.
• The action sequences are uniformly dull and unmemorable, and coming so soon after The Dark Knight trilogy this is unforgivable
• The ending tries to generate emotional stakes that the film hasn’t earned, from the appalling Martha nonsense to the fates of the lead characters
• There are any number of random dream sequences which seem to be an attempt at foreshadowing, but when only lifelong comic book readers will take anything from them the general audience is likely to feel totally lost
• The universe building is shambolic, having your main character sit down at the end of the second act of your film to effectively watch trailers for upcoming films in the franchise while the plot stops dead for ten minutes is an insult and cameos from characters we haven’t met yet becoming a deus ex machina is appallingly lazy
• It’s unbelievably po-faced and serious – The Dark Knight proved you can weave humour through darkness and grit, but this film is almost oppressively self-important and deadeningly humourless
• The dialogue. For the love of Kryptonite, the dialogue. Examples:
  • “He has the power to wipe out the entire human race, and if we believe there’s even a one percent chance that he is our enemy we have to take it as an absolute certainty… and we have to destroy him.” Er, no.
  • “That is a three syllable word for any thought too big for little minds.”
  • “Master Wayne, since age 7 you have been to deception as Mozart to the harpsichord. But you’ve never been too hot at deceiving me.”

Frankly, this film would be at the bottom of the list, but they managed to make Wonder Woman more cool than Bats and Supes put together for ten minutes. Next time it has to be better for longer. A lot longer.

7. Gods Of Egypt – 2/10

I’ll be honest, if you gave me a free cinema ticket in return for watching one of the films on this list again, it would almost certainly be this one. It’s mostly bonkers, rarely boring and looks spectacular in places. But in other places it looks unfinished, CGI not even looking close to properly rendered, it perpetuates unnecessary white casting in films, it tries to take itself seriously at all the wrong times and the script is a craggy mess. To try to pretend that it’s so bad it’s good would be a falsehood; it’s so bad that it’s train-wreck watchable, but it’s not good / bad enough to be future cult viewing.

6. Office Christmas Party – 2/10

You know what’s worse than a dreadful office Christmas party? Watching other people have to endure a dreadful office Christmas party. I love Christmas, but this almost made me renounce my religion and give up presents it’s so deeply, deeply unfunny. There are only so many more American “comedies” that I can sit through while not a single person in the audience can generate the energy to even chuckle. Kate McKinnon’s performance in Ghostbusters went a large part of the way to saving that film, but even she can’t rescue this one from the mire of mistletoed mediocrity.

5. Hardcore Henry – 2/10

Hardcore Henry wants to put you in the perspective of someone playing a video game. But it’s shot and acted in the most rushed, disinterested way possible, and the experience of watching it is as if someone has put a VR headset on you, then repeatedly kicked you down a flight of stairs. The movie’s general idea and concepts are fun, such as giving Sharlto Copley multiple roles, but the whole film – shot on GoPro cameras and then edited together in such a way as to automatically induce vomiting if you look at the screen for more than five seconds – is almost entirely unwatchable. The absence of interesting characters, dialogue or plot then take it the rest of the way.

4. David Brent: Life On The Road – 2/10

The third BBC sitcom in this list turned film, and the third one which I couldn’t stand. The film, that is, not the original series, which was a piece of genius. What made this the polar opposite of the series that spawned it? Was it the absence of Stephen Merchant from the writing which saw all of the offensiveness without any of the humour or pathos? Was it that most of the new characters are as interesting as reading a stationery catalogue (with the one exception of Tom Bennett’s brilliantly sympathetic Nigel)?

Was it, maybe, that the film’s third act redemption of sorts is unearned and the 180 degree turn of the other characters is unbelievable? Was it that the songs Brent writes aren’t inadvertently brilliant or laughably terrible, just predictably mediocre? Or was it that being an idiot with no self-awareness is something that is taken too far in this portrayal of David Brent? Many of the attitudes towards lesser characters – such as a mentally ill woman who presents Brent with a dead insect – are failings of the film, not Brent, and it’s too often just offensive without the smarts to make that funny.

3. Mother’s Day – 2/10

Let’s remember Garry Marshall, who directed Mother’s Day, and who sadly died last year aged 81. Let’s remember him for Happy Days and Mork & Mindy, which he created. Let’s remember him for Pretty Woman, for Beaches and for The Princess Diaries. Let’s try to to forget that this slightly racist, bullishly unfunny travesty ever happened. Let’s try not to dwell on how it costs $25 million these days to put together a film which is too inert and mawkish to be a drama and too mugging and obvious to be a comedy. Garry Marshall, rest in peace and thank you for the memories. Just not this one.

2. Nine Lives – 1/10

A film so terrible that it cheapens the memory of every other film you’ve seen starring the people in this one, from The Deer Hunter to American Beauty (and, frankly, even 13 Going On 30). A children’s film disturbingly obsessed with death and suicide, which plays out for large stretches as a faked YouTube cat video and which makes the laziest choice every time it has to make one. It tries to hand out life lessons, but the only lesson it’s taught me is “don’t watch any more Barry Sonnenfeld movies.” My cat will often sit on my bedside table and claw at my face to wake me up, and I’d rather sit through an hour and a half of that than ever watch this again.

1. Dirty Grandpa – 1/10

I’m still not sure I’d go as far as describing myself as a film critic, but I watch a broad enough variety of films to say that, if I’m expecting you to listen to my opinion, then there has to be a chance I’ll enjoy any genre of film that you put in front of me. So it’s not that I dislike crude, lewd humour: Jackass 3 made my top 40 of the year in 2011. Nor is it that I can’t find offensive films funny: Dan Mazer, the director of this one, has writing credits on some of Sasha Baron Cohen’s best work, including Borat and Bruno. I like humour to provoke me and push boundaries, and you’ll notice that one particular comedy from 2016, Grimsby, isn’t in this bottom 20 because as dreadful as it was in parts, its elephant sex scene actually had me in fits of appalled laughter.

It’s also not that Robert De Niro is a bad comedic actor, almost the opposite. From Midnight Run to Meet The Parents, The Intern to Analyse This and The King Of Comedy to Wag The Dog, De Niro is as versatile an actor as he is a dramatic heavyweight in more serious roles. It’s also not that he doesn’t commit to this role: it’s clear that he’s giving his all to this performance, when he has just occasionally sleepwalked through film roles. And it’s not that there’s any problems with the supporting cast: Zoey Deutch was a delight that balanced out the atmosphere of testosterone in this year’s Everybody Wants Some!!, Zak Efron has shown he can be great in the right roles in films from Hairspray to Liberal Arts and Aubrey Plaza is brilliant in the likes of Life After Beth and Safety Not Guaranteed.

And I’m not even sure it’s the script, which on the 2011 Black List, the annual list of the most highly regarded unproduced scripts in Hollywood. (Although, saying that, maybe the 2011 list wasn’t a vintage one, as despite having Django Unchained it also contained The Accountant, Grace Of Monaco, Jane Got A Gun and this. Compare that to 2010, which had Argo, Looper and Stoker, or 2012, which contained Arrival, Hell Or High Water, John Wick and Whiplash.)

So what is it that makes Dirty Grandpa such a toxic hellhole of anti-comedy? How can it be that we’ve ended up with 102 minutes of mirth-free, soul destroying unreconstructed racism, sexism and homophobia attempting to pass itself off as funny? Why do I get the feeling that watching my cat cough up hairballs onto a fat, sweaty bald man cutting his toenails while episodes of “It Ain’t Half Hot, Mum” play on a loop in the background would be preferable to, and less offensive than, sitting through this garbage? Is it possible that you can put too many great ingredients together and inadvertently create something awful?

No. Simply put, it’s got only one trick to try to be funny, and that’s to be as crass as possible, but when that fails time after time it’s just profoundly, resoundingly unfunny to almost unprecedented levels. Eventually the repetition of tedious, blundering doltishness – and sometimes, repeating the exact same jokes – reaches such levels that the sheer act of continuing to try to be funny becomes offensive in and of itself. Most of the characters are zero-dimensional, soulless shells that it’s impossible to root for, yet the film sets them on a course so predictable that your average invertebrate who’s lived on a remote island its entire life could probably see what’s coming.

So thank you, Dirty Grandpa, for at least ensuring that a film with Kevin Spacey and Christopher Walken in it wasn’t the worst thing I saw in 2016. It’s just a shame something with Robert De Niro and Aubrey Plaza in it had to be.

Previous years:

The 10 Least Best Films I Saw In 2015 “WINNER” – Pixels

The 10 Least Best Films I Saw In 2014 “WINNER” – Nymph

The 10 Worst Films I Saw In 2013 “WINNER” – A Good Day To Die Hard

The 10 Worst Films I Saw In 2012 “WINNER” – Seven Psychopaths

The 10 Worst Films I Saw In 2011 “WINNER” – Battle: Los Angeles