As great as the great movies were this year, the terrible ones were shockingly, horrifically bad and these are the five worst offenders.
- Blackhat: We love Chris Hemsworth as Thor here at Everything Action but it seems like everything he does outside of the MCU is sort of a miss and Blackhat was a massive, idiotic miss. Casting Hemsworth as the world’s greatest hacker, it’s a boring, lifeless thriller that tries to jazz things up with CG visuals of the “battle” in the computer world but nothing can jazz up it’s plot that makes Quantum of Solace look ingenious and it ends, inexplicably, with more reliance on Hemsworth’s prison skills than his hacking skills.
- Fantastic Four: You don’t often see the cinematic equivalent of a middle finger but that’s basically what Fox made with it’s soulless, contractually mandated placeholder to keep the Fantastic Four rights away from Marvel. There’s pretty much no redeeming qualities of this version of the FF and it wastes four of the best young actors working today, who have all been excellent in other movies and shows. You can feel the studio interference with it’s bizarre time jumps and one of the worst finales of all time where they try to save a movie pretty devoid of action with 15 minutes of terrible CG smashing together.
- Taken 3: Liam Neeson is one of our spirit animals here at Everything Action but the movie series that put him on the map as an action hero needs to die. Olivier Megaton continues to commit crimes against action movies with more incoherent foot and car chases as Bryan Mills gets stuck in a poor man’s version of The Fugitive while being hunted by a bizarrely acted cop played by Forest Whitaker. If you really need your 2015 Liam Neeson fix, check out Run All Night instead, even though that movie is simply OK.
- The Lazarus Effect: Whoever thought a PG-13 spin on movies like Re-Animator was a good idea should be immediately fired as The Lazarus Effect is just a toothless and boring plod through horror cliches that somehow has actors like Olivia Wilde, Mark Duplass and Donald Glover in it (but then makes them deadly serious and boring even though they’ve all been hilarious elsewhere). I don’t know if it would have been better as an R rated movie but it might have been a little bit more interesting and, as is, it’s the usual dumb horror that draws in the tweens for one weekend.
- Pixels: After hearing all the hyperbole about this being one of the worst movies of all time, I thought Pixels actually started out OK but, yeah, it quickly goes downhill as things start making less and less sense and things get less and less funny. The idea is great and I can only imagine the instant classic if someone like Edgar Wright tackled it but someone like Chris Colombus paired with a bored Adam Sandler makes a movie about invading video game characters somehow dull and wastes people like Josh Gad and Peter Dinklage. It also raises a lot of disturbing questions like “How did Kevin James become President?” and “Did Josh Gad just have sex with Q-Bert?”.
Not Necessarily Bad, Just Disappointing
- Spectre
- Tomorrowland