Top 7 - The Worst Films of the 2010's
Being someone who writes about films online, I have naturally made much of my name (the little that has been made) by talking about very bad films and breaking them down while trying not to have a breakdown myself. I personally much more enjoy celebrating films I adore but it has to be said, there is a pleasure I get in tearing down films that deserve to be hated. As such, we are finishing this month of madness with the very worst films I saw all decade. Unlike all the other lists, I did not seek out films to put on this list, they were ones I was simply unlucky enough to suffer through for my own reasons. Smosh: The Movie, Slender Man and Keith Lemon: The Film are probably awful, but I was lucky enough to not see them. Speaking of, many of these films I saw to review for the blog so, just like the Best Films list, I'll be linking to any full length reviews I've written of the films over the last six years. With all the caveats out of the way, let's dive face first into the films that made my life a misery this decade.
21. Bohemian Rhapsody
I couldn't end the decade without one last kick at my favourite dead horse. Bohemian Rhapsody is a film that managed to trick stupid people (to be fair, a large amount of stupid people, including Oscar voters) into thinking it was a good film by playing music people like. In reality, it was a spit in the face in the legacy of a legendary band I've struggled to enjoy since, even before considering the (alleged) crimes of its director. There are films that probably deserve to be here more but few films have made my blood boil quite so much this decade.
20. Mute
I used to be a really big supporter of Duncan Jones. Moon is a terrific debut film, Source Code is an intriguing second feature and I even support Warcraft more than most. Mute ended that trust, with a bafflingly awful film that managed to be a total misstep in almost every conceivable way.
19. The Cloverfield Paradox
The Cloverfield Paradox was a brilliant marketing move, having a trailer be released during the Super Bowl, mere hours before the film was available. Unfortunately, that was the most interesting thing about this film, a film that wasn't satisfied with just being a bad sci-fi film and also decided to ruin the legacy and intrigue of the two films that came before it.
18. Suicide Squad
Suicide Squad is a special kind of bad. Somewhere in here, there's probably a mediocre film but after a trailer for the film came out that imitated the style of Guardians of the Galaxy, the trailer company got to make a cut of the film. Their cut and the original cut were spliced together into a Frankenstein's Monster of a film that inexplicably has a huge fan base and a worldwide gross of over $700 million.
17. Transformers: The Last Knight
Incredibly, Transformers: The Last Knight isn't the worst Transformers film. It isn't even the worst one this decade but, with its seemingly randomly chosen aspect ratio, vomit inducing editing style and hideously shallow characters, it's not exactly Citizen Kane.
16. Bright
What if Training Day but Lord of the Rings? That was the question Max Landis had while writing the screenplay for Bright, presumably after being kicked in the head by a horse. Netflix made a lot of great films and TV shows this decade but Bright makes me wish the platform had far less monetary freedom.
15. Hellboy
By all accounts, David Harbour seems to be a perfectly lovely man, so I'm not going to place any of the blame for Hellboy on him. Honestly, it's tough to know where to place the blame for a film that seems this poorly thought out from the ground floor, be it in the excessive gore, pointless story or agonising humour. The only person related to this film who deserves scorn is the stupid idiot who saw it in a cinema: me.
14. The Mummy
Cinematic universes have become a huge trend this decade and one of the saddest films came from a pathetic attempt to cash in on that. The only thing that makes The Mummy more laughably bad than its film making already makes it, is the numerous moments the film pauses to setup future films that will now never exist. It would be funny if it weren't so sad.
13. Johnny English Strikes Again
No type of bad film makes me angrier than bad comedies, because at least bad films of other genres offer comedy from their poor quality. If you've failed to make a comedy, you've failed to elicit a single ounce of joy from me and that's precisely what Johnny English Strikes Again. I hope Rowan Atkinson doesn't want another house anytime soon, or we'll be getting a fourth miserable instalment.
12. Christmas Wedding Planner
"Made for TV Christmas films" is a genre ripe for making fun of and admittedly, Christmas Wedding Planner is probably the only one of them on this list because it's not a genre I consume much of. However, I'm totally happy having it on the list because of how repulsively capitalistic, bland and just plain white it is. Christmas Wedding Planner almost single-handedly turned me against both Christmas and white people (being turned against capitalism was already happening, I don't give the film that much credit).
11. The Amazing Bulk
There's a famous expression that with the advances in technology over the last few decades, anyone can make a film. The Amazing Bulk is a compelling argument that not everyone should make a film. A nightmare on green screen and an incredible deep dive into the world of stock footage, this is a film whose awfulness only reveals itself over the agonisingly long runtime.
10. Kirk Cameron's Saving Christmas
I'm agnostic, but at this point in my life, I try to be pretty accepting of everyone, whatever their own personal beliefs are. Kirk Cameron's Saving Christmas is the most oppressively religious film I have ever seen, patronising the poor members of the audience who choose to stray from God's warm arms. My views on religion are now that anyone can believe what they want, as long as they aren't Kirk Cameron, who I believe should be punched in the throat. Oh, the film is also deathly boring.
9. Jurassic Shark
There's a strange sub-genre of low budget B movie which consists of a little bit of bad CGI, padded out with a lot of awful acting and walking around the woods. Jurassic Shark is exactly that, a film so very bad because it's also completely boring. The only moments of note are the moments of shark attacks and even those are tremendously underwhelming.
8. The Haunting of Sharon Tate
There are some (myself included) who feel like Quentin Tarantino's dealing with the Manson Family murders in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood was a little dodgy and slightly exploitative. Next to The Haunting of Sharon Tate though, it looks as respectful as Son of Saul. Trashy slasher films that objectify women are one thing, but when they're based on real and completely tragic life stories, you leave a film like this and need a long bath, preferably in bleach.
7. Swiped
I am not even sure I can describe Swiped. Often, bad movies feel very distinctly like the work of a handful of crazy individuals, individuals that everyone else trusted for whatever reason. Other times, they're the result of too many incompetent cooks in the kitchen. Swiped just feels like a black hole of a film, quickly cranked out to exploit the popularity of Noah Centineo. I've never felt particularly down with the kids, even as a kid, but Swiped made me feel like I have a remarkably robust understanding of youth indeed.
6. 5 Star Christmas
Often, comedies struggle to translate across language barriers. Sometimes I think I should maybe give 5 Star Christmas a little bit more credit because of that difficulty but then I remember the agony I went through watching this film. Believe me, even if the comedy didn't translate, the horrific casual racism, misogyny and classism did! Every single thing about this film feels tailor made to piss me off and if that was the case, I guess that at least was a success. Never let people tell you all foreign films are inherently better than English language films when films like 5 Star Christmas exist.
5. The Lion King
I'm sure some people aren't quite going to believe that I've put The Lion King on this list but truly, it is one of the most insulting and upsetting two hours I've had this decade. The 1994 The Lion King is one of my favourite animated films ever, a film that feels truly original and uses wonderful music to help move along a story that you care about. When Disney decided to remake it in "live action" though, they stripped it of joy entirely. The visuals aim for photo-realism and not only do they not quite manage that, they remove all character from the characters. The songs are all either slightly worse versions of the old favourites or new songs that are so forgettable I genuinely couldn't name one. Perhaps the most egregious offence, they do all of this while adding an extra 30 minutes to the runtime, making it a punishing film to sit through. The Lion King embodies the trend of all the other films from this point of the list onward, in that it is a film as poorly made as it is creatively bankrupt. Adding to the sting is the fact that it made over $1 billion worldwide, making a compelling point that maybe we actually did deserve a global pandemic.
4. Transformers: Age of Extinction
To convince you how awful this film is, I could talk about many of the awful things that pollute Transformers: Age of Extinction. I could talk about the how the action is presented in ways that make it impossible to work out who is shooting an explosive thing at someone else. I could talk about how a pointless plot is dragged out for an extra hour, just so that the film could go to China and have product placement for an entirely new international market. I could talk about how for some reason, the film feels the need to do all of this over two hours and forty five minutes. I don't need to talk about any of those though, I just need to talk about the "Romeo and Juliet law" scene. For those who are lucky enough not to be familiar with it, it is a scene where the film completely stops so that one of the characters can explain to Mark Whalberg's character why he (an adult) allowed to date Mark's 17 year old daughter. It ruins the pace (the only thing that could save a film this long) and feels exceptionally creepy that they felt the need to do this, instead of just making the daughter 18. Oh, and just like The Lion King, it made over $1 billion at the box office. The only note of comfort is that the series never reached these financial highs again, even as the films started to get better.
3. Pan
It is actually pretty hard to explain exactly what about Pan I hate so much. I saw it while I was in sixth form and had a card for my cinema that allowed me to see an unlimited number of films. The sixth form was a couple of minutes from that cinema and on Fridays (the day when new films get released), I had a three and a half hour break, meaning I could go and see any new movie the day it came out. I saw many wonderful films because of that, but I also experimented, finding something to fill that time every week regardless of how good the new releases were. One of those weeks was the week I saw Pan. This is a film that manages to do exactly nothing right. It's an origin story for Peter Pan (something exactly no one asked for), full of setups for future sequels (something exactly no one asked for) and it contains two separate acapella covers of beloved rock songs (something exactly no one asked for). Every time I think about this film, I get irrationally mad and I think in part the madness is because Pan has slipped under the radar. It is a film that has managed to be forgotten, when it actually deserves to be paraded through the centre of town and shamed.
2. The Emoji Movie
Obviously. Back in 2017, The Emoji Movie was heralded as the death of cinema as an art form and while that wasn't exactly true, it remained a pretty close call. This is an ugly movie, visually and creatively, a movie that seems to exist for no other reason than to cash in on trends that died a few years ago. When The Lego Movie came out in 2014, it blew everyone away and proved that when tasked with making a movie based around a product, you can do it in a way that is funny and entertaining and genuinely original. Unfortunately, the creators of The Emoji Movie made that without the humour, entertainment or the originality. Instead, this is a parade through all your favourite apps, including Spotify, Dropbox and, for some reason, Just Dance. I don't want to say much more, my hatred for this film was so infamous that my flatmates made me watch it a second time, to see how angry I would get and any more words wasted on this film is more effort put in, that the makers of this film didn't reciprocate.
1. Jack and Jill
I'll give Adam Sandler credit where it's deserved, he has managed to be the only lead actor to have films in both my best of the decade and worst of the decade lists. That is all the credit that Adam Sandler will be getting for Jack and Jill, the strongest argument I have ever seen that cinema was maybe a mistake as an artistic medium. It's a charming tale of an advertising executive whose twin sister comes to stay with him for Thanksgiving, except the hilarious twist is that Adam Sandler plays both roles! Hysterical! It truly is Some Like It Hot for the modern generation. To move away from the sarcasm, the reason Some Like It Hot works is that there are more jokes than "men are dressed as women" and even those jokes make sense in the world of the film because the characters are pretending to be women. Jack and Jill doesn't work on that level because Adam Sandler is playing a woman, but the character is actually a women, meaning the only joke is "she is ugly!". Every single piece of wretched "humour" in this film is some jab at someone with a lower social position than Adam Sandler: there's women, minorities, orphans, elderly people the poor, poor women, female minorities, poor minorities and of course, poor female elderly minorities. Where some of the best comedies this decade worked because they're wholesome and heartfelt, Jack and Jill doesn't have one sincere bone in its body, because all those bones had to be removed to make way for all the adverts.
Factoring in inflation, you could make Booksmart, La La Land and Uncut Gems twice with the budget behind Jack and Jill.
What do I mean by that? Well, Jack and Jill is basically a money laundering scheme. This film cost $90 million. Reading this, you may not have a reference point for what that means so let me try and put it in perspective with some recent and brilliant films. Booksmart, a funny and wonderful comedy from last year, cost $6 million. La La Land, an extravagant and complexly staged musical, cost $30 million. Even Uncut Gems, a film where Adam Sandler can be sighted giving a shit, cost $19 million. Factoring in inflation, you could make all of those films twice with the budget behind Jack and Jill. What did all that money go to though? Watching the film, it is impossible to tell. The best guess is that Adam Sandler and all his friends got massive fat paychecks to come to set and hang out with each other, a set partially funded by adverts apparently. This is the convenient thing about Adam Sandler's character working in advertising, a minute long advert for Dunkin Donuts can play and no one bats an eyelid. Red Letter Media have an amazing two-part video on this, which I highly recommend checking out if you want to know more. Jack and Jill is gross, disgusting, misallocation of money, the kind of thing that makes me pray for the death of capitalism as we know it. Were it just unfunny or just grossly mismanaged, the film would still be repulsive but seeing as it is both, it makes Jack and Jill the worst film I have ever seen.
Because I didn't want to end on a negative note, we are going to celebrate the films that are so bad they're good. This is an area of film I have adored this decade and while the prime era for it was the eighties (a time when Hard Ticket to Hawaii, Vampire's Kiss and Miami Connection all released), there's been some gems regardless, some of which I was lucky enough to see in a cinema. Typically, "so bad they're good" films rise from the swamp of time after years hidden away, meaning I am sure there are many awful treats we're yet to discover but, as of right now, these are the films I have loved hating this decade.
14. The Bye Bye Man
One of the least scary horror films I've ever seen, The Bye Bye Man is boring for quite a while, but the final act is so joyously stupid that it's almost worth sticking around.
13. Cyberbully
Films or shows about the internet, made by adults who clearly don't understand the internet, is a genre that rarely fails to disappoint and Cyberbully certainly does not.
12. Fifty Shades Darker
I haven't seen either of the films surrounding the second Fifty Shades movie, but I spent a wonderful, slightly delirious evening with some friends after an exam watching Fifty Shades Darker, the ultimate joke of an erotic thriller.
11. Skyscraper
The Rock climbs a skyscraper that is on fire and currently contains his family. That's it, that's all Skyscraper is and with a couple of drinks in you, it is absolutely hysterical.
10. Gods of Egypt
There is a level of poor craftsmanship on display in Gods of Egypt that makes it hysterical to me. How any could even make a film like this and feel okay releasing it into a cinema boggles the mind, but it still cracks me up regardless.
9. Wish Upon
What a silly, silly horror film. As Wish Upon itself says, "be careful what you wish for" but if you're wishing for a clumsily made film where people die in ways that become accidentally hilarious, all ending with a hysterical car accident, you're wishing for exactly the right film.
8. The Meg
As soon as the trailer for The Meg was released and we saw Jason Statham look pretty much straight into the camera and growl "It's a megaladon", everyone knew what kind of masterpiece we were in for. My personal highlight was seeing this drunk in the cinema with some mates and quite loudly saying during one shark attack "Nice", audible to all the other patrons.
7. Venom
Again, Venom is a film that you can barely believe was allowed to be released into cinemas, a film which seemingly no one understood the vibe of. The only person who seemed to understand the insanity of what was on screen was Tom Hardy, who went fully mental in his role and while it's hardly an Oscar worthy performance, it is sensationally committed. The surprise highlight of the film was the moment when the Venom symbiote is separated from Tom Hardy and has to get from a dog, to Tom Hardy's girlfriend and is then transmitted between the two of them by one of cinema's most off-putting kisses ever.
6. Nine Lives
Close friends know I have an... Interesting history with Nine Lives, a history I will not be going into today. Regardless of my personal history, Nine Lives is a sensationally misjudged film, a film that is only more uncomfortable now with all we know about Kevin Spacey. In this film, Kevin Spacey is a rich and inconsiderate businessman, who is turned into a cat for reasons I have already forgotten. Throughout the film, he must get closer to his daughter and use what Christopher Walken refers to as a "poopy box", before eventually returning back to his human form when his son tries to kill himself. It is as hysterically misjudged as it sounds and I highly recommend it to anyone who is very drunk.
5. Birdemic: Shock and Terror
4. Crazy World
I feel a little bad dismissing Crazy World as a bad film, so let me put it in context first. This is a film from Wakaliwood, a film production company in Uganda. As you might expect, they have pretty much zero budget, but they make action films because they're passionate about the medium and that passion infects every frame of their film making. They also have the unique feature of putting something called a Video Joker in all their films. A video joker is a man who comments over the movie, much in the way that you might do yourself with drunk friends. What this all leads to is film making that is amateur but which has a heart and soul that is irresistible. Calling the films of Wakaliwood bad feels cruel, but it at least means I can put them on lists like this and extol their virtues.
3. Serenity
If you have any interest in seeing Serenity, move on now, because I am going to reveal the big twist of the film in order to explain how apocalyptically stupid this movie is and I'm going to have to spend the whole paragraph talking about it in order to explain it. The twist at the core of Serenity is that the characters we see on screen are in a video game, created by the real life version of our main character's son. See, Matthew McConaughey was a veteran in THE WAR in real life, so this is the son's way of keeping him alive, while having to listen to his mum get constantly beat up by his new step-dad. It starts to get absurd when you realise that this child has created a game in which his dad spends his life chasing a fish called Justice and having sex with hot Diane Lane. The film ends, I think with Matthew McConaughey escaped the simulation, banging his fake video game wife/real life wife who had to move on because he died and his son murdering his step-dad. The destination this film is approaching is totally mental, but the journey is just as perplexingly pants.
2. Who Killed Captain Alex?
Wakaliwood make a return to this list, a return that is only a shock if you have never seen any of their films. Who Killed Captain Alex? was their first film and from the ones I've seen, it is the absolute best. Calling the production low budget would be an insult to low budget film making, but it is made by people who cared. By Crazy World, they knew they had a market, but this was a film made that was never expected to see the light of day and it therefore has an incredible purity. There is no adequate way to describe the joyful production that this film is (though I should warn you not to go in looking for answers to the titular question), but I fortunately don't have to. The entire film is on YouTube and quite frankly, I recommend you all make sure you watch it tonight, instead of that thing from the best of the decade list that you quite fancied. This is amateur film making at its most charming.
1. Fateful Findings
I've spoken at length about my love of The Room, but its biggest problem is that Tommy Wiseau has become self aware of what he made. It was a brilliantly incompetent film but the kind of thing you could never make on purpose, meaning that he is never going to make a film quite as wonderful. Enter Neil Breen, the man whose strange face on that poster you have probably become obsessed with already. He is an actor, director, writer, producer, architect, craft service provider, make-up artist and location scout whose complete control over pretty much every part of his films means that these are the works of one man and his very strange brain. In 2005, he made Double Down, a film about a super hacker genius walking around a desert, hacking the world. In 2009, he made I Am Here... Now, a film in which he plays an alien who is either sent by God or is God, here on Earth to stop people from being prostitutes and taking drugs. Then, in 2013, he made Fateful Findings, the film which brought him out of the shadows and into the hearts and minds of fans of bad films. Since then he has made two more films, Pass Thru and Twisted Pair, films I'm sure would have made this list if I had seen them but for now, we're here to talk about the sheer Breenius that is Fateful Findings.
From this point on, the only concrete thing I remember is him throwing books and coffee at a lot of laptops.
Full disclosure, I've seen Fateful Findings once and was very drunk, so I may not be the best at recalling the plot, but here we go. There are two children who have a magical day together (which we know is magical because they write it in a book) and they find some mythical rock that has powers of some sort. The boy grows up and then gets hit by a car. He goes to the hospital and then starts to teleport, I think? His wife dies? Someone gets shot for cheating on his wife? There is teleportation into a room full of bean bags? From this point on, the only concrete thing I remember is him throwing books and coffee at a lot of laptops, but I do remember laughing hysterically at all of it. It is the kind of bonkers, plotless movie that demands to be viewed obsessively over and over. As I write this, all I now want to do is watch this beautiful mess, a film in which every single thing that could go wrong does go wrong. The acting is abysmal, the script is impressively poor and everything else isn't much better. It is a terrible, terrible movie that I adore with my core. Neil Breen and all his bonkers film making choices deserve to be celebrated and hard though it may be to find his films online, it is worth the hunt. They're magical films.
Thank you for sticking with me through this slightly crazy month. These lists have had a bunch of wonderful support and they've been really hard work. We've got some really exciting films coming out in the next few weeks, expect some reviews of them and we'll see where it all goes from there
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