2009 Calvin Awards: Worst Picture
February 11, 2009
BoxOfficeProphets.com
The overwhelming champion for 2008 was M. Night Shyamalan's The Happening, finishing with twice the points of any other film in our survey. Watching the career arc of M. Night makes a person look around for a helmet to put on to protect from the incoming missle. After a meteoric rise with The Sixth Sense, his films since then have steadily increased in our unease with them, with a steep decline either with The Village or Lady in the Water, depending on your personal perspective. With The Happening, he turned into the equivalent of Wile E. Coyote dashing off a cliff and not realizing that he's standing on air, then careening into the bottom of a canyon.
But where to begin? Billed as his first R-rated movie (as if that alone made it an event), The Happening promised apocalyptic terror. Cryptic clips hinted at something so terrible that it cause mass suicides. It's the kind of setup that makes you wonder what someone with such a fertile imagination could do with it. In Shyamalan's case, the answer turned out to be...plants.
Okay, that wouldn't be such a bad idea, except that he expected us to be terrified by the idea of plants somehow sensing the presence of humans and fighting back against overpopulation by driving us to commit suicide. His main characters end up spending most of the film running away from the wind, as if it were a) possible and b) interesting to watch. Not only ludicrous in plot, it featured unbelievably stilted dialogue, incompetent acting and scare scenes that belonged in Monty Python. Later, he tried to play it off like it was supposed to be corny, but you could see his ego dying a little each time he said it. For all these reasons and more, it's one of the most worthy winners of our Worst Picture in some time.
Second place went to 10,000 B.C., Roland Emmerich's attempt to simultaneously piss off both scientists and creationists. Playing something like CW Presents: Quest For Fire, this was a laughably bad excuse to dress up actors in caveman costumes and throw them into ridiculous battle scenes. Although we weren't expecting an anthropological study, the portrayal of this so-called ancient world was just insulting. Snow-capped mountains gave way to rainforests, which turned into deserts all in the span of just a few miles of walking. Beasts from vastly different eras were placed together in ways that weren't possible, and the film wasted what was arguably its ace-in-the-hole, the resurrection of a sabre-toothed tiger. All in all, it made The Flintstones look like a documentary.
Will Ferrell promised that Semi-Pro, our third place finisher, would be his last sports-themed movie ever. If the rest were going to be like it, we'd hold him to it by threat of grievous bodily harm. Ferrell tried to make this his Slap Shot, but forgot that the Hanson Brothers were the side show in that movie, and not the leads. When Ferrell is on, he can make one of the funniest films in years, but when he's off, it's more akin to torture. This one was like someone dribbling a basketball on our heads for 90 minutes asking if we were laughing yet. No, Will, we are not laughing.
When it comes to our fourth place finisher, we really should have seen it coming. Indiana Jones and The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull was a long overdue revival of the classic adventure series, with the promise of a return of the cool Harrison Ford. But even with Spielberg behind the camera, George Lucas, he of the anti-Midas touch in the last two decades, was still a producer of the film. It's hard to say exactly what his input was or wasn't, but we can dream about what film might have arisen from if he'd been locked in a storage room for safekeeping for six months. It'd take too long to list all the awful scenes and lazy plotting of this film, but let's go with just two – nuclear bomb shelter fridge, and Shia LaBeouf The Ape Man. ‘Nuff said?
It's almost too easy to pick on the recent spate of parody movies, since they barely even count as films. But since they come out seemingly every four months, it's safe to say they started it. Meet the Spartans was judged the worst of these this year, placing fifth overall. It mostly picks on 300 for "inspiration"; it also rummages through recent horror films, James Bond and random pop culture moments of the last year in a craven attempt to not have to think up any new ideas. This is a film that Homer Simpson wouldn't laugh at, even with a crayon in his brain.
Tied with Spartans was Wanted, which ranks as perhaps one of our more bitter disappointments of the year. The comic adaptation promised innovative and reality-bending action scenes akin to The Matrix, and while the special effects were there, the underlying ideas didn't pass muster. While the thought of bending a bullet around a target mind sound like a great idea initially, in practice it's - not to put too fine a point on it - really, really stupid. It certainly didn't help in the least that we were given a cast of thoroughly unlikeable, misogynistic characters who take orders from a magic loom (you heard me), and it made us wonder what we were thinking in the first place.
Also falling into the category of "good concept, awful execution" was Jumper, which managed to ruin teleportation as a superpower. Feeling quite like half a movie, it played like X-Men for ADD sufferers, never bothering to create little things like a coherent story or characters with motivations.
Eighth spot goes to Mamma Mia!: The Movie, the adaptation of the musical based on the music of ABBA. Need I say more? Okay, in theory, this could be done well, but one would presume that in a musical, casting based on an actor's ability to sing would play some role.
Ninth place went to the wholly unnecessary The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor. They might as well start making animated sequels to these films for all the live action footage that goes into these anymore.
Finally, what would a Worst Picture list be at BOP without a Uwe Boll film? The German Ed Wood gets off easy this year, with his social "satire" Postal placing tenth overall. The jig is finally up with Boll, and he's finding it harder to get his films seen, but he's still out there, ruining the good name of video game adaptations. Oh, how we wish we could quit you, Uwe. (Reagen Sulewski/BOP)
Best Actor
Best Actress
Best Album
Best Cast
Best Director
Best DVD
Best Overlooked Film
Best Picture
Best Scene
Best Screenplay
Best Supporting Actor
Best Supporting Actress
Best TV Show
Best Use of Music
Best Videogame
Breakthrough Performance
Worst Performance