The Five Worst Films of 2008
Never Back Down, Southland Tales, Hell Ride, The Hottie & the Nottie
Jan 3, 2009
5. Never Back Down- Never Back Down is the kind of film teenagers like because it portrays teenagers who never actually act like real teenagers. It revolves around an uninspired plot, ripped from countless other bad films that don’t do it quite as bad as this. There is not one good scene in the film, not one good line of dialogue and not one character drawn sharply enough for the audience to even care about, leading to a climax that will be seen coming from miles away.
4. Southland Tales- The world was waiting for Richard Kelly’s sophomore film after his Donnie Darko snuck in under the radar and become an unexpected cult sensation. Well here it is, and at two and a half hours, it is an incomprehensible disaster. Part science fiction, part social commentary, part psychobabble and mostly nonsense, the film was booed offscreen at Cannes in its original three hour version, had half an hour hacked out and now rambles on, not knowing what it is about, how it is about it, what it is trying to say, how to say it or how any of its dozen or so characters are even related. 2008’s biggest disappointment.
3. Hell Ride- The Grindhouse films that inspired Hell Ride had the advantage of coming out at a time before the term irony had entered into the cultural lexicon; they had no point of reference other than themselves. Hell Ride is an homage to those such films: cheap, cheesy, explicit, excessive, but not a good one because it lacks the reckless abandon of being a film with nothing to lose. It is too stylish, too serious, and, at less than ninety minutes, doesn’t even begin to have a plot that is understandable or worth caring about. Grindhouse is a unique and distinct form of cinema; it can speak for itself.
2. The Hottie and the Nottie- What’s baffling is that someone thought that this stupid, unfunny, shallow, offensive and mean-spirited film, which stars one Paris Hilton, should be put into theaters, when there were a handful of good if not at least worthy films in 2008 with bigger stars that went straight to video shelves. Of course, the film tanked, which is good because, were it to have been a hit, it probably would have put feminism back a couple decades.
1. Jumper- Jumper is just plain stupid. It doesn’t even begin to understand the power that it’s characters possess (sometimes they can jump anywhere they want and sometimes they need a wormhole to a place they have jumped before), it doesn’t know who its villain is or why, as he states in the worst line of dialogue Samuel L. Jackson has ever spoken, he “hates jumpers” so much. Plus, where did this power come from, and how did the main characters acquire it? Jumper is too lazy to ask any of these questions and instead glides by with no plot to speak of, and no narrative structure, showing audiences countless, mind numbing jumps, which are distracting and undercut the action. There’s just too much jumping. It’s understandable the need to jump halfway around the world, but jumping a couple inches on the couch because you can’t reach the remote? Really now!
Honourable Mention:
Meet the Spartans-It isn’t known who keeps going to see these stupid, unfunny, uninspired parodies from Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer (Epic Movie, Disaster Movie, Date Movie, etc.) but here’s begging: please stop. Don’t put money into these films, don’t go to the theater to see them, don’t rent or buy them on DVD, if the situation get’s that desperate to see celluloid wasted on this garbage, download it; get it for free. These guys must be stopped from desecrating a scared and valued art form any longer.
