I think I may have put a little too much effort into this, but whatever...
#10 - DESPERADO
Ah, Robert Rodriguez. His low-budget technical skill is outweighed by the decidedly lame scripts he decides to apply them to.
Desperado is one such film, revolving around a one-dimensional killing machine (played by a wooden Antonio Banderas) and pits him against a bunch of guys in fights that rip off John Woo movies. All this is supposedly original because of the addition of a Mexican flavour to the whole film.
#9 - RATATOUILLE
When it comes to a film like this, something like
Ratatouille should be good enough to pull you out of a bad mood. I was in a really bad mood when I went to see
Ratatouille. It didn't work, and all the fancy computer animation in the film didn't make the slightest difference.
#8 - NATURAL BORN KILLERS
The whole "outlaw couple on the road" is a tricky theme to get right. It can go from good (
Badlands) to OK (
True Romance) to "meh" (
Wild at Heart) and then to downright awful. Guess which one
Natural Born Killers is?
#7 - TWO HANDS
Try and imagine if Guy Ritchie did a movie in Australia and it turned out crap. You essentially have
Two Hands, an attempt at a crime caper/black comedy that wholeheartedly feels like an Australian rip-off of
Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels. Heath Ledger is the film's hapless "hero" who gets pulled into a big mess revolving around lost money and struggles to fight his way out of it - but so what? Hard to care about him or anyone else. The fact that it's set in Australia and is full of bad stereotypes and annoying accents makes it even harder to swallow this extremely weak crime thriller.
#6 - TRAIL OF THE PINK PANTHER
I have to wonder about the intentions behind this film. Made after Peter Sellers' death and cobbling together handfuls of old footage and stand-ins, it follows a loose plot about a reporter interviewing random people about Inspector Clouseau's life. It seems like one really bad attempt to cash in on the Pink Panther name (at least until Steve Martin ended up doing remakes for God knows what reason) and although there's the possibility that it was intended to be a tribute to Sellers and the character, it certainly doesn't seem that way. Also, it's not funny.
#5 - THE HITCH-HIKER'S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY
How do you take one of the funniest books ever written and turn it into one of the unfunniest movies ever made? Watch this and find out, where the soul gets totally sucked out of the story in a film that, for all we know, actually tried to make the best possible film under the circumstances, but just failed anyway. This actually makes it a rather depressing entry on the film, now that I think about it, but it's on the list. Oh, well.
#4 - DIE HARD 4.0
Take a loveable action hero -
Die Hard's John McClane - make him old, bald and pit him against a team of cyber-terrorists when he doesn't even know the first thing about computers (therefore relying on a hip young shill for Macs to handle the tech stuff for him). Fortunately, that leaves him to concentrate on the realistic, breathtaking stunts that the Die Hard series is famous for - such as...
driving a car into a helicopter? Over-the-top stunts, poor supporting cast, lack of the harsher stuff of the earlier films (including cutting out the use of "motherf***er" in McClane's catchphrase) and a convoluted computer-related plot all make for one horrible experience. Say what you like about
Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, but that's
The Godfather compared to this.
#3 - OCEAN'S 12
I remember being forced to see this because my friends and I weren't old enough to get into
Team America at the time. Mein Gott, that was only the beginning. Watching a handful of smug Hollywood stars hanging around in exotic locations trying to look effortlessly cool while trying to pull off some hopelessly convoluted heist (and letting it fall by the wayside so we could watch those awesome stars be awesome, yay!) plus throwing in the impossibly bad "Julia Roberts" joke/plan.
#2 - KNOCKED UP
Best comedy of 2007, my arse. Every single character was not only unlikeable (between the immature slackers or the uptight suburbanites), but extremely unfunny, even when bad stuff happened to them. It was all attached to a horribly conventional rom-com plot about an unplanned pregnancy between two polar opposites and how they try to make it work out. Throw in some unfunny jokes about sex, doctors, weed, film nudity, overprotective parenting (Leslie Mann is the most annoying character in the film - quite an impressive feat, actually) and stretch it out for TWO HOURS and you have
Crapped Out...I mean,
Knocked Up.
#1 - MILK MONEY
Want to know how bad this movie is? More often than not I forget to list it among the worst movies ever made - I think it's because I try to scar the memory of seeing this movie from my mind. It's about an annoying-as-hell little preteen kid who befriends a hooker and all the wacky mishaps that result from it. Irritating kid actors, a ridiculous plot and cringe-inducing turns from otherwise good actors such as Ed Harris and Malcolm McDowell make this the undisputed king of all the bad movies I've ever (and most likely will ever) watch.