AV Club's 15 Worst Films of 2010: 1. The Last Airbender

15. Hot Tub Time Machine

"Hot Tub Time Machine looked like it would have it all: a funny title, a clever premise that took a bunch of middle-aged men back to their misspent ?80s youth, a bunch of talented leads, and cameos from ?80s fixtures. So why turn it into a lazy collection of obvious Reagan-era references, meandering subplots, and casual sexism, with a finale that negates the tiny bit of soul-searching the film allows its characters? Up-and-comer Clark Duke provides the lone bright spot amid the mess. Get that kid in better movies, pronto."

 

This was indeed one of the most awful films of the year. I approve of this list so far.

 

I know Rogue had high hopes for it, and had precisely your reaction.

 

Disagreed. I think it's very awful. Yes, Corddry is moderately amusing, but Craig Robinson is wasted playing a bundle of clichés. Every funny moment in the movie is in the trailer -- the rest is gay jokes, rape jokes, gay rape jokes, and 80s nostalgia that's only funny because haha it's the 80s, not because they actually do anything funny with the material. The women in this movie exist only for the men to have sex with: they are props instead of people. This movie is garbage, and even worse because the concept had the potential to actually be funny.

True, there are a few worse movies this year, though I'm not sure I could name fifteen of them, but at least most of them are merely awfully dull (The Bounty Hunter), or awfully stupid, or awfully constructed (Jonah Hex), rather than hitting that perfect combination of offensive and not funny. The only worse (theatrical) movie I've seen this year* on that particular level is MacGruber.

*Still haven't seen Killers or Vampires Suck, but I imagine both of them fall more into the dull category than the offensive. I wonder what other overlooked gems this thread will reveal, and whether I'll have the self-respect to refrain from watching them to see for myself.

 

14. Letters To Juliet

"In theory, the romantic comedy Letters To Juliet should be charming, given the gorgeous Italian locations and lead performance by the usually reliable Amanda Seyfried, playing an aspiring writer who takes it upon herself to help an old woman resolve a half-century-old heartbreak. But as written, performed, and directed, Letters To Juliet is pitched ludicrously high. From the moment Seyfried gets exasperated because her enthusiastic fiancé wants to spend the day consuming awesome food and wine in the Italian countryside, it?s clear that this is going to be another love story about the absurdly privileged being mildly inconvenienced."

 

13. Multiple Sarcasms

"It would?ve taken a lot for writer-director Brooks Branch to overcome a title as godawful as Multiple Sarcasms, but Branch?s debut doesn?t do him any favors with a plot that has Timothy Hutton playing a successful architect who annoys his family by writing a play about how, man, love is hard. For all Branch?s efforts to make a movie with the flavor of real life, Multiple Sarcasms plays more like a bad stand-up routine dramatized by serious actors?a string of ?Did you ever notice?? jokes with the punchlines removed."

Never heard of it, and I would have remembered an awful title like than.

 

12. The Bounty Hunter

"Some bad romantic comedies are actively risible, like number seven on our 2009 worst films list, The Ugly Truth, which pitted Katherine Heigl against Gerard Butler in a grating, regressive battle of the sexes. But The Bounty Hunter is a bad romantic comedy of another kind, a movie so generic and lackadaisical that no one seemed to care what happened after the contracts were signed. It just assumes that audiences will want to see Jennifer Aniston Rom-Com No. 8, no matter how it turns out. Though every bit as couched in misogynist resentment as The Ugly Truth, the film?s premise of a bondsman (Butler, who?s becoming a reliable fixture on this list) tracking down his bail-skipping ex-wife (Aniston) has some potential for kinky, Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!-style shenanigans. But the PG-13 rating keeps it in line, leaving the film to mark time between Aniston/Butler bickering sessions with a procedural that wouldn?t pass muster on the nether reaches of basic cable."

 

I don't know who keeps giving Aniston leads in films expecting her to draw an audience. She isn't strong enough to carry a film. She's fine in an ensemble piece but not as a lead. Perhaps producers are confusing seeing her in tabloids all the time as being someone that the public wants to see onscreen. It's not the same thing.

 

I think she could carry a film. She's just made awful choices. Nobody could have carried The Bounty Hunter. It was so immensely dull and trite on every level that I doubt any combination of actors, no matter how much charisma and chemistry they might have, could have made it even a good movie, let alone great, without a complete rewrite of the script. But she's an attractive, charismatic actor who's capable of being very funny, and I think her consistent failure has more to do with taking lousy roles than with innate talent or lack of presence.

As for Butler: I actually kind of liked him when he was in low-key dramatic roles like Dear Frankie. But now he's been typecast as either an obnoxious comic or an action hero or some combination of the two, neither of which he's capable of pulling off despite his physique.

 

She's working while she can, I suppose. It's not her choices, but what's available for a forty-something actress: scripts with Sandra Bullock's fingerprints on them. If she wants quality and interesting characters to play, she'll have to go back to TV.

Next:

11. Marmaduke

"The trailer for Marmaduke?adapted from a comic strip whose continued existence seems to be an example of how inertia works in the newspaper business?made it look like a Beverly Hills Chihuahua-like headache of talking animals and musical numbers. It isn?t quite that, but there?s little pleasure to be had in hearing Owen Wilson as a clumsy Great Dane as he pals around with George Lopez as his feline sidekick. And good luck untangling its tortured premise, which gives dogs the personalities of teenagers and treats the dog park like a high school, complete with cliques and popularity-jockeying, just as nobody always suspected. On the upside, you?ll never hear an actor hit the line ?A surf contest for dogs?? with the gravity William H. Macy brings to the reading."

What is William H. Macy doing in this awful piece of offal, while we're discussing that?

 

10. Killers

"Speaking of The Ugly Truth, Katherine Heigl and director Robert Luketic follow up on one of last year?s worst films with a new collaboration, Killers, and the best that can be said about that is, it isn?t utterly atrocious. Heigl plays an unhappy single woman who falls in love with an assassin-for-hire played by Ashton Kutcher, then learns that just about everyone in her life is involved with international intrigue. Heigl is still a bright screen presence, and Kutcher is surprisingly good at playing suave and dangerous, but Killers? quippy dialogue and strained mistaken-identity plot are a complete drag. Is Heigl actually incapable of playing a recognizable, complex adult woman, or merely uninterested in anything but broadly sketched cartoons?"

 

9. Flipped

"It can be hard to remember a time when the prospect of a new Rob Reiner movie inspired anticipation instead of bone-chilling dread. Though The Bucket List was a hit commercially, the director of This Is Spinal Tap, The Princess Bride, Misery, and When Harry Met Sally? has largely spent the last decade and a half tarnishing his reputation with dogs like Ghosts Of Mississippi, Rumor Has It, The Story Of Us,and Alex & Emma. Add the sappy period romantic comedy Flipped to that list of shame. Bathed in a sepia-toned glow, Flipped tells the tale of the unlikely romance that develops between the blandest teenage boy in existence (Callan McAuliff) and a Manic Pixie Dream Girl in training (Madeline Carroll) who isn?t about to let anything as trivial as McAuliff?s complete disinterest in her prevent her from winning his heart. Flipped boasts dual narrators, which means the same terminally dull scenes get repeated from contrasting points of view. Just when it appears that Flipped cannot get any direr, it ropes in Carroll?s developmentally disabled brother for a little cheap pathos."

 

I saw the trailer for this and was just blown away at how utterly terrible it looked.

 

The Bucket List was one of the most awful films of 2007. The trailers for this film were terrible. Not interested in subjecting myself to it just to confirm its position on the worst of the year list.

Killers I also have not seen, but I may or may not succumb in a fit of self-loathing and morbid curiosity and watch it.

 

8. When in Rome (2010)

"When did ?romantic comedy? become synonymous with ?showcase for stupid wackiness?? Each successive rom-com hitting the market over the last decade seems to have felt obligated to top all the others for far-fetched super-gimmickry, and the cutesy-poo Kristen Bell vehicle When In Rome gets particularly insulting about it. Bell plays an ambitious career woman in love with her job (the audience knows, because she says ?I am in love with my job?), but she wistfully wishes she were in love with a man, too. Then a bunch of men magically wind up in love with her after she picks up the coins they dropped into a wish-granting Roman fountain. And by ?in love with her,? the film means ?dedicated to making her life a wackadoodle hell by doing ridiculous things like giving her sausage bouquets and stripping in public.? From moment one, there?s no question about whether Bell will end up with handsome, generic love interest Josh Duhamel; all the noisy, nasty pointlessness that comes between their meet-cute and their happy ending is the entertainment equivalent of clown-nose honking, spinning noisemakers, and simulated farts."

 

I hope "sausage bouquet" isn't a euphemism. Though it would make a great one.

 

It would.

 

7. Grown Ups

"Most folks have to pay for their own vacations. Adam Sandler has them all beat; not only did he get Columbia to pony up $80 million to finance several months of hang-out time with buddies like Kevin James, Chris Rock, Rob Schneider, Colin Quinn, and David Spade under the fiction that he was making a ?movie? called Grown Ups, he actually had the unmitigated gall to charge audiences for the privilege of watching what is essentially the most expensive, lucrative home movie ever made. Lazy even by the exceedingly lenient standards of a Happy Madison production, Grown Ups offers an unpalatable combination of juvenile gross-out humor and maudlin sentimentality involving the leads? dead coach and Sandler?s daughter trying to find heaven using the GPS in her dad?s car. Sandler doesn?t just want your money, he wants your tears and your heart."

 

Yet another "comedy" that somehow didn't even manage to find a single funny moment for the trailer.

 

<<<<Sheepishly raises hand and looks down at the floor.......ikindoflikedgrownups

 

6. Finding Bliss

"Julie Davis? desperate indie comedy turns on a series of wacky developments that beg for sound effects, like a scratching-record or a drooping noise. Plucky Leelee Sobieski stars as an award-winning NYU film-school graduate who immediately finds work as a Hollywood director?a traffic director on the studio lot, that is. Ho ho! Then she catches her big break after answering an ad for a position as editor? of porno movies. Ho ho HO! Still unwilling to abandon her dreams of indie-auteur success, Sobieski surreptitiously shoots her own movie after hours using porn actors, because if there?s one thing hairy-palmed connoisseurs love about adult films, it?s the acting. It?s hard to miss the connection between Davis? aspirations and her heroine?s, but there?s nothing in the movie?and less than nothing in the movie-within-the-movie?to suggest a female Woody Allen in the rough. Garry Marshall, Denise Richards, and Jamie Kennedy (as a dim porno actor named ?Richard Harder?) turn up to heighten the aggravation."

Did this get released? Because I never heard of it.

 

I saw a preview. It looked like it had the potential to be at least a moderately amusing if fairly standard quirky indie thing, but I didn't care enough to try to watch it.

 

I still remember back in the late 90s when Leelee Sobieski was supposedly going to be one of the new upcoming actresses to watch out for.

 

Leelee? No,no.