10 WORST MOVIES OF 2006
10. Snakes on a Plane: I guess I expected this one to be more ironic than actually stupid..
. Also, a little disappointed that Samuel L. Jackson didn't literally punch out a snake.
9. Freedomland: Is Sam Jackson ever going to make a good movie again? Is Julianne Moore for that matter?
She wasn't even good in this one...
all hysterics. You know your movie isn't working when the audience isn't really that invested in a child-snatching storyline!
8.
Zoom: Coming right on the heels of last year's surprise commercial and critical hit, Sky High, Zoom fails in every conceivable way. Even for a kids superhero movie, the characters and story just don't make a lick of sense.
7.
Poseidon: Sad, sad remake that forgot that the characters were what made the original a classic, not the effects or the sensational plot.
6. Scary Movie 4: I can't remember a single joke from this latest entry in a franchise that's getting increasingly worse.
5. Stay Alive: Wow. Some group of high paid execs actually thought this was a cool idea.
.. Actually thought the game within the movie looked good enough to be believably scary.
..
4.
Date Movie There's a Hugh Grant impersonation that was pretty spot on and made me laugh, and it's at the very beginning of the movie. Go ahead and turn if off after that.
3.
Saw III: Why does this series have a fan base? The quality of this franchise is dropping off fast, and it didn't start off all that high to begin with. I hate that the franchise can't seem to figure out how to call Jigsaw out on his moral superiority/hypocrisy in a smart way.
2. The Grudge 2: The most boring movie of the year. If only the writers spent half as much energy coming up with a decent story as they did dreaming up ways to generate pity for the evil entity.
.. I don't mind create a backstory for your killer, but a horror movie isn't about the killer.
.. unless it is (see: Saw).
This tendency to create excuses and elaborate explanations for movie killers really annoys me (see: Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning).
1. Lady in the Water: Not quite as boring as our No.
2 film, but this one gets the top spot for being so unrelentingly self-satisfied. M. Night Shyamalan casting himself as a visionary writer destined to be martyred for his work.
.. is he so disconnected from reality?
? Poorly written, poorly directed, poorly paced..
. And, unlike his other movies, just a bad premise from the get-go. Paul Giamatti delivers yet another hackneyed performance, but most of the other cast does alright.
I wish Shyamalan would stop trying to be funny in his movies...
the comedy bits in his movies always me feel uncomfortable, they're so bad.
OTHER DISAPPOINTMENTS (Not necessarily the "runner-up" worst movies of the year)
American Dreamz: Can you blame me for expecting more out of Paul Weitz, director and co-writer of one of the smartest string of comedies in recent memory: American Pie, About a Boy and In Good Company? Not to mention the cast: Hugh Grant, Mandy Moore, Willem Dafoe, Shohreh Aghdashloo, et al.
Should have took the Dennis Quaid red flag more seriously...
(kidding, he isn't to blame for this mess).
Ask the Dust: Once again, a case of expecting more from someone who delivered in the past. This time, it was writer-director Robert Towne, who wrote the brilliant Chinatown.
The directing was fine, and Colin Farrell and Salma Hayek were great, but the writing was so bland...
so very bland.
Flags of Our Fathers: Boring and awkwardly told to boot..
. Told in three timelines when only two were necessary, and cutting away to another timeline just when the one we're watching gets interesting the movie had no momentum whatsoever.
The Pink Panther: Remaking a classic with an iconic Peter Sellers performance was an admittedly risky venture to begin with, but I nevertheless had higher hopes for a Steve Martin/Kevin Kline comedy.
..
Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest: Textbook example of the overblown sequel.
A critic over at calls it when he asks us to imagine Kramer as the star character of "Seinfeld" this essentially what's been done with Johnny Depp's great Jack Sparrow here. He's a great garnish, but makes a lousy main course.
World Trade Center: Too mushy and anonymous.
Like a Lifetime movie. I expected so much more from Oliver Stone..
. Also, I didn't get any sense of variation from the two families in terms of how they reacted..
Of course there is a common emotion at the center, but their reactions should have differed more...
Shown us two styles of coping...
Two women at different places in their lives. Instead, it felt like we were cutting between the same characters only played by different actors..
.
News RSS