Worst Movies of 2016 (So Far)

Better late than never I always say. I’ve mentioned many times about beating my record of 100 movies last year and I am now well on my way after seeing 92 movies so far this year. That is a lot of movies and I can’t even imagine where I’ll be at the end of the year. Out of the 92 movies I’ve seen so far in 2016, there definitely were some good ones and some not so good ones. Now I’d like to talk about the 10 worst movies I’ve seen so far in 2016. Some of my descriptions are from an earlier post of the worst movies of year 1 of keithlovesmovies.com

10. Criminal (review)

This was another of those kinds of movies that sound better on paper. A cast featuring Kevin Costner, Gary Oldman, Tommy Lee Jones, and Ryan Reynolds (who didn’t get main billing for some strange reason) sounds very promising but they were just wasted here. I won’t even start to explain the plot since it didn’t really make much sense. The actors definitely committed to the movie but that did not make them any less silly. Any movie that kills off the more interesting character played by Reynolds early on does not usually end well. Costner was just terrible here playing a criminal who assumes the identity of Reynold’s character. His bad guy side was so over the top that it was hard to watch and his inner conflict with Reynold’s character was unbelievable. I felt bad for Jones who was actually decent here.

9. Warcraft (review)

I am vaguely familiar with the franchise despite not being that much of a fan. From the trailers, I thought it was going to be some amazing fantasy war movie in the vein of The Lord of the Rings, despite the overly CGI trailers, but it was not even close. I said that I was vaguely aware of the franchise but there was a lot going on here, more than I was able to understand so non-fans of this franchise will definitely find all of this very convoluted like I did. I decided to give up trying to understand it early on and just let myself be dazzled by the special effects but even that didn’t work out since they weren’t very good to begin with. What didn’t help was that there was so much of it which made none of the film look real. The acting wasn’t that great either.

8. Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates (review)

Now another movie that sounds good on paper but doesn’t live up to expectations. Zac Effron, Adam Devine, Anna Kendrick, and Aubrey Plaza are all great comedic actors so this one had the potential to be very funny and since this is on my worst list, you can probably figure out how it went. This was a real shame all around as everyone just felt wasted here since they are all better than what we saw. The plot was messy and unfocused, the characters were undeveloped and unlikeable which made this movie very painful to watch. The only good thing about this movie was Sugar Lyn Beard as Jeanie Stangle. This was only due to nostalgic reasons as I was surprised to learn that she used to host a weekday cartoon block when I was a kid called “The Zone”.

7. Norm of The North (review)

I’m a big fan of animated movies with fun stories and memorable characters. This definitely was not the case here. Funny that an animated film released in 2016 looks like if it was released in the 1990s. Nothing felt original here as it was very cliche and derivative of other, better animated movies. Happy Feet and Madagascar immediately come to mind. Great animated films can engage both young and old but I did not find this very engaging as it was more on the boring side. A lot of animated films are funny for the kids but I did not find it very funny at all. The voice acting was okay but it didn’t really matter since the script and the story was that bad. If you need a good animated movie from 2016, watch Zootopia.

6. Mother’s Day (review)

I haven’t seen any of director Garry Marshall’s other “holiday”movies but I heard that they are not really good. Of course when you want to see everything, you’ll occasionally run into movies like this. The problem about films with interlocking stories is that it has to find just the right balance between them. This wasn’t the case here as the film would jump around between each haphazardly so none of them were ever able to gain any momentum. They also did not all fit together within the frame of the story. None of them were overly interesting as they all felt very cliche and predictable. All of the supposedly emotional stuff just felt forced as the acting screamed phoned in across the board. This film is just an insult to all mothers as it was just one big over-glamorization of motherhood, lacking any realism whatsoever.

5. The Young Messiah (review)

Now you’ll probably sense a theme most of the last five movies as they all share something in common. If there was anyone that ever needed a backstory, it’s Jesus obviously. Since there obviously isn’t any record of such a story, the filmmakers had to mostly make things up, using some material from the book “Christ The Lord Out of Egypt”by Anne Rice. I don’t really having anything to go on but there was little going on here that seemed plausible. I did also sense some exaggeration with the “facts”. The movie could still have worked despite this but it was just so boring because of the bad pacing. It just felt like 3/4 of the movie was spent marching towards something. Kid actors can sometimes be very annoying in general and this definitely was the case here as the 7-year old actor they cast to play young Jesus (Adam Greaves-Neal) was quite annoying here. What could of been interesting was the main enemies in the movie which were the Romans, featuring Sean Bean but not even him could save this.

4. Risen (review)

Time for another religious movie! This movie follows the story behind the resurrection of Jesus (Cliff Curtis), who is called Yahshua for some reason, from the perspective of a “non-believer” in a Roman tribune named Clavius (Joseph Fiennes). This one kind of started off interesting but fell apart very quickly into an incoherent mess. I just found myself caring less and less about the story the longer the movie went. Clavius was just a very uninteresting and boring character since there was no development for anyone whatsoever. I found myself not caring about any of the characters at all. Not even Tom Felton as Lucius who served no purpose to the movie whatsoever. The visuals and the music were okay but got very repetitive very fast. This movie was just so disappointing, including Jesus/Yahshua who was so lame.

3. Misconduct (review)

I admit that I forgot about this when I made my worst movies of year 1 of keithlovesmovies.com and maybe that was a good thing. I kind of want to forget that this movie even existed. I would not have guessed that a movie with both Al Pacino and Anthony Hopkins would even be on this list but they are partly why it is here in the first place. This is the textbook definition of phoning it in. Everyone here for some reason lacked energy and felt robotic which made me not get into this at all. Everything about this movie was just so derivative of better suspense/thriller movies that it was funny. The story here doesn’t make much sense either, starting off slowly for the first 2/3 of the movie and trying to make up for its convoluted nature  by making many weird leaps and bounds but I just didn’t really care about it.

2. The Boy (review)

Based on the first trailers, I wasn’t expecting this to be any good and surprisingly enough, I was right. While it still had potential, it was squandered by horrible writing and bad performances. In terms of horror movies, this was pretty standard fare with weird sounds, things moving on their own, and the like but it was all much too predictable. This story had no excitement whatsoever or made any sense. The movie tried to have a lot more going on other than the story but it just didn’t work. Even though the twist was pretty obvious, I still won’t give it away. I didn’t care much for the characters as they were stereotypical. cliche, and just plain old stupid. Having to sit through this was real torture.

1. God’s Not Dead 2 (review)

While the first God’s Not Dead was just some pretentious pro-Christian propaganda, this one is just as much if not more. This one again features a devout infallible Christian having to defend his/her religion against evil atheist authority. The argument here, which I will not get in to, of course lacks any logic or sense but who cares? Christians are morally-righteous and everyone else is evil and how dare they oppose Jesus? Characters are one-dimensional in that they existed only to perpetuate pro-Christianity or not. The big thing here was the whole idea of separation of church and state but continuing with the film’s one sided nature favoring Christians, church can interfere with state but state can’t interfere with church. I just found the film’s hypocritical nature to be very off-putting.

Keith Noakes

The EIC of the coincidentally-named keithlovesmovies.com. A Canadian who prefers to get out of the cold and into the warmth of a movie theatre.