Worst of 2017 Cinema: A look back at the cinematic flops of 2017Kevin Smith’s Yoga Hosers is 87 minutes of awful, the worst flick he’s ever made. Smith steals the thunder from us critics by making Mallrats jokes, but that’s a classic compared to this. Lily-Rose Depp and Smith’s daughter Harley Quinn Smith play social media obsessed convenience store clerks who discover a secret society of Canadian Nazis. Even the Stan Lee cameo is excruciating to watch. I have a hunch that Harley Quinn Smith and Lily-Rose Depp could actually carry a well-written film, but Yoga Hosers ain’t it, eh?
In M. Night Shyamalan’s Split, James McAvoy gives a bravura series of performances as a man with 23 different personalities who kidnaps and imprisons three teenage girls in an isolated underground facility. McAvoy’s performance is too good for Shyamalan’s movie, which doesn’t play fairly within its own logic and — spoiler alert — seems more concerned with setting up the filmmaker’s next deal than in making the best film.
After Green Lantern, Iron Fist is the silliest superhero I’ve ever encountered. It doesn’t help that his fight scenes suck and that he dresses like Pee Wee Herman. Rosario Dawson shows up just when you want to abandon ship, and her sarcastic banter raises the series a letter grade, but in farming terms, “Marvel’s Iron Fist” is the runt of the Netflix litter.
The Dark Tower wastes a good cast by boiling seven books into 95 minutes. Sorry, Sony — only 30 hours on Netflix or HBO or Amazon would begin to do justice to Stephen King’s epic fantasy series.
Every single shot in Luc Besson’s Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets would make a great comic-book splash panel. Too bad he let the actors start talking.
It hurts seeing Roger Corman sidelined and irrelevant, dribbling out idiotic schlock like Roger Corman’s Death Race 2050, his remake of Paul Bartel’s Death Race 2000 (1975). Bartel’s film is a drive-in classic, a $400,000 futuristic satire about a coast-to-coast road race where the drivers earn points for the pedestrians they run over. Corman’s reboot proves that his fleabag movies really don’t fly anymore. This version of one of the great cheap movies just reeks of what Frank Zappa called “cheepnis.”
I can’t top my pal Jamie Lewis’ analysis of The Mummy, Universal’s ill-advised attempt to reboot their classic monster movies into something —anything — like what Marvel and DC are doing: “The Mummy was a 120-minute sales pitch for a product no one’s wanted since 1936.” (Apologies to Abbott and Costello.)
There seems to be a growing faction of filmgoers out there who just want to watch Common get the stuffing beaten out of him. If that’s your thing, then John Wick 2 is your kind of movie.
Ben Wheatley’s Free Fire is one of the most unpleasant experiences I have ever endured. A bunch of unintelligible IRA members and crooks rub each other the wrong way during a weapon buy. Fifteen minutes of murky set-up and 75 minutes of excruciating shoot-out. What is Brie Larson doing in this mess?
British crimes movies, Lina Wertmüller remakes, Sherlock Holmes …Oh, Guy Rit-chie, is there a genre you can’t ruin? No essential King Arthur movies have been made since Monty Python and the Holy Grail, Excalibur and The Fisher King. Ritchie’s King Arthur: Legend of the Sword continues the losing streak in a big way, a medieval remake of Gladiator, The Lord of the Rings, Oliver Twist and Ocean’s Eleven (!) •
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) been remade into a feature length movie.
