Worst of 2014: Zach’s Bottom 10

There were tons of great and good movies this year and it definitely made the terrible ones glaringly obvious.  The range of terrible from this past year went from over bloated, stupid blockbusters to boring would be thrillers and more.  Here’s my picks for the 10 worst movies of 2014.

1. Transformers: Age of Extinction: If you thought that the Transformers series could not get any worse, you were in for a rude awakening this past Summer as Michael Bay bludgeoned audiences into a stupor with the dumbest, longest, most incomprehensible movie of the series.  The sins of this movie are many not the least of which is a “joke” sequence where a character justifies his statutory rape of his underage girlfriend, which may put it in contention for one of the worst movies of the decade.  The much hyped Dinobots are also only featured in the last 15 minutes of the film and do literally nothing to help in the “epic” final battle and the once noble Optimus is turned into a murderous psychopath who ends the movie in a style worthy of Poochie and flies off to punch the robo-gods in the face, or something.  I could feel my brain struggling to escape while watching this abomination.
2. Sabotage: Although he redeemed himself slightly with Fury, David Ayer commited a crime against Everything Action that we may never be able to forgive, putting our patron saint, Arnold Schwarzenegger, in one of the most aggressively awful movies we’ve ever seen.  Every character in the movie is a raging douchebag of the highest order and it’s a welcome relief when they start getting killed off one by one.  It also commited the sin of straight up lying about it’s premise in the trailer, so you were doubly disappointed when you went to see this awful brofest.
3. 3 Days to Kill: Kevin Costner tried and failed to usurp Liam Neeson this year in with his spy action movie 3 Days to Kill, another movie that kind of lied about what it was actually about in the trailer.  If you were expecting a sort of Crank style spy movie where Kevin Costner has to kill a bunch of people with a time limit over his head, get ready for disappointment as it’s basically a relationship drama as Costner tries to rebuild his broken relationship with his daughter. What action there is is sporadic and generic. If Taken was nothing but scenes of Liam Neeson and Maggie Grace yelling at each other then crying, it would be 3 Days to Kill.
4. Sin City: A Dame to Kill For: It’s amazing that a movie with so much Eva Green nudity would still be boring and lackluster.  Well past a time that people would be excited for a Sin City sequel, whatever originality A Dame to Kill For might have had in it’s visual style or violence has been surpassed by much better films in the intervening years.  All the characters all feel interchangeable as well and their plots all follow the same basic beats, so it all just feels pointless.  At least the Machete films are batshit insane to compensate for what they lack in plot or characters.
5. Amazing Spider-Man 2: The level of Sony’s incompetence in handling the Spider-Man franchise reached new heights this past Summer as Amazing Spider-Man 2 learned nothing from the first film and amplified the first film’s flaws to ridiculous new levels.  With a plot on the level of the Schumacher Batman films, a baffling use of dubstep for the score, sideplots that went nowhere and an amount of endings that would put Return of the King to shame, this movie should hopefully kill Sony’s involvement with Spider-Man and bring him home to Marvel Studios where he belongs.
6. Dracula Untold: If there’s one word that should never enter the discussion when talking about Dracula, it’s “boring” but that is exactly what Dracula Untold is, a huge bore.  Trying to give Dracula a kind of Batman Begins style origin, the reason and execution of his transformation into the Prince of Darkness is beyond stupid and it follows the most generic plot for these types of fantasy action movies. The movie also culminates in two bizarre sequences, the first of which lets us know that this Dracula is a huge dick and the second weakly sets up Universal’s cinematic universe for it’s classic monsters.  If this where the Universal Monsters series is going, I’m extremely worried.
7. Deliver us from Evil: Another middling horror entry from the factory of producer Jason Blum, this movie feels like a weak episode of Constantine or The X-Files as NYPD detective Ralph Sarchi investigates a series of grisly crimes that seem to have something to do with writing uncovered by a team of SEALs in Iraq.  The movie feels like the real Ralph Sarchi got drunk with the producers in a bar and just made up bullshit, since this movie has nothing to do with any of the “real” cases Sarchi has investigated in NYC (“No bro, there was like two lions and I had to face them down and they ran away because of how bad ass I am”)
8. I, Frankenstein: Unlike Dracula Untold, at least I, Frankenstein was batshit insane in it’s awfulness, so at the very least you can laugh at it’s stupidity with friends.  Taking the Frankenstein story to levels that the Underworld movies would consider ridiculous, it’s basically just scenes of expository dialogue that saddles people like Bill Nighy with saying some of the stupidest bullshit of the year in between action sequences that look like a cutscene from a video game.
9. Transcendence: You would think a movie where Johnny Depp becomes Skynet would at least be somewhat interesting but Transcendence was just lifeless on pretty much every level.  All the actors feel like they were dosed with heavy tranquilizers before each scene, the ramifications of such an earth shattering event are never explored and there’s long stretches where just nothing interesting is happening.  This movie is probably going to end up being the 2010’s version of The Net.
10. Into the Storm: I’ll admit that I have a very soft spot for Twister but I still think that almost 20 year old movie trumps this lame rehash in pretty much every way.  Into the Storm is filled with terrible, cliche characters who are thrown into cliche situations and it’s capped off with one of the laziest attempts at found footage in recent memory.  There’s doesn’t seem to be any thought regarding if it makes logical sense and the perspective jumps from character to character with no rhyme or reason, plus, the tornado action is not even that exciting and had zero creativity.