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The 20 Worst Film Follies of 2016

These 20 films choke and bludgeon the senses rather than nourish or enliven them.

The 20 Worst Film Follies of 2016
Photo: Pure Flix Entertainment

The films selected as Slant Magazine’s worst follies of the year, in short, write checks that they can’t cash. These cinematic fouls include the Hollywood remake of a Charlton Heston classic and an independent horror film that amounts to, in the words of our own Chuck Bowen, “stunted necrophilia erotica.” In other horrific cases, such as in Eddie Murphy’s first film in four years, “melodramatic banalities” mixed with regressive race relations to conjure the dreaded “magical negro” trope. Lastly (and possibly least), Mel Gibson returned to the director’s chair after a decade’s absence to resurrect his inner Catholic gorehound from The Passion of Christ and Braveheart, only this time you’ll find young men’s innards strewn along the battlefields of WWII. The film, like all of those on our list, stays caught in your throat like creative napalm, choking and bludgeoning the senses rather than nourishing or enlivening them. Clayton Dillard


The 20 Worst Film Follies of 2016

Ben-Hur

The makers of this latest Ben-Hur clearly recognize the primacy of the chariot race to the property’s popularity and, accordingly, have constructed the entire film around this one sequence, opening on a flash-forward to the race, basing the central relationship between Ben-Hur (Jack Huston) and his adoptive brother, Messala (Toby Kebbell), on their shared love of horses, and foreshadowing the film’s climax so frequently that it’s hard to care about anything that happens along the way to the inevitable showdown in the circus. Of course, it’s also hard to care because the film is conceived and directed less as a sweeping epic than as a talky, plotty, melodramatic made-for-TV special in the vein of The Bible (which, like Ben-Hur, was co-produced by Mark Burnett and Roma Downey). Despite some pleasantly campy touches, from Morgan Freeman’s ridiculous dreadlocks, to Rodrigo Santoro’s portrayal of Jesus as a kind of sexy Jedi, to a hilariously disconsonant final shot featuring Ben-Hur and Messala riding horses in slow motion set to a schmaltzy pop song, Timur Bekmambetov’s film is a pretty staid affair. Keith Watson


The 20 Worst Film Follies of 2016

Captain Fantastic

Captain Fantastic is premised on a radical act—that we can chuck it all, pack up the family, and move off the grid—that it dutifully trivializes at every turn. Writer-director Matt Ross makes little attempt to illuminate how and why people might choose to alter their lives so drastically, and basic questions are never really answered: What exactly is Ben’s (Viggo Mortensen) endgame? Does he expect his kids to get married at some point? Instead, the family’s exposure to society renders them increasingly absurd, to the point that, when they finally arrive at their mother’s funeral, they burst in mid-service wearing garish clothing (a red ’70s suit, a gas mask, a dinosaur costume), with Ben hopping on the altar to deliver a screed against organized religion. This isn’t the behavior of radicals bucking the system; it’s the antics of characters contrived to hit the quirky, crowd-pleasing notes that made Little Miss Sunshine a hit with audiences. Watson


The 20 Worst Film Follies of 2016

Creative Control

Though Creative Control, about a tie-tugging business twentysomething who finds himself as unfulfilled in the board room as he is in the bedroom, is overrun with characters, it’s less interested in their identity than their plasticity, almost as Sisyphean shells to hinge a treatise of despair upon. Flashes of satire appear, like how every male character sports glasses and a beard, as if the uniform of futurity became permanent via the present stylings of bohemia. However, it’s never made clear whether the representational choice deliberately jabs at corporate marketing campaigns or whether the homologous fashion choices are merely a stroke of the film’s own pronounced pretentions, not least of which includes “Sarabande” being played in nearly half a dozen scenes. In other words, the satirical pitch of Creative Control is consistently drowned out by its self-wallowing aesthetics. Dillard


The 20 Worst Film Follies of 2016

Equals

Equals is concerned with how mind control asserts itself through the covert modification of everyday routines, but it doesn’t evince any interest in how its future world sustains itself. Apologists for this speculative fiction might argue that this world’s industrial infrastructure is beside the point—that the film’s purpose is to deliver onto us a cautionary tale about moral infrastructure. Maybe it’s not even meat on those plates during the film’s depiction of lunchtime. (Maybe it’s soy!) But if director Drake Doremus’s sense of world-building doesn’t extend beyond the suggestion of fascist control through fussily symmetrical compositions (life here is oppressive by virtue of resembling a Ludwig Mies van der Rohe house writ large), Nathan Parker’s screenplay is no less starved for detail. It all comes down, simplistically and repeatedly, to “feelings make us feel alive.” Ed Gonzalez

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The 20 Worst Film Follies of 2016

The Eyes of My Mother

In The Eyes of My Mother, Nicolas Pesce flatlines all emotionality and intellectualism, offering images and scenarios that exist in a void of contrivance. There are no reasons for the characters to do what they do here beyond the necessity of the jerry-rigged plot, which borrows from dozens of other sources and abounds in ludicrous dime-store Freudian intrigue and Oedipal obsessions that are common of self-consciously arty horror films. There’s no discernable theme or resonance either, beyond a smug belief in the inherent truthfulness of cruelty for cruelty’s sake that suggests hours spent studying the early work of Michael Haneke, or recent films like Goodnight Mommy and Tom Six’s Human Centipede sequels. Chuck Bowen


The 20 Worst Film Follies of 2016

The Girl on the Train

The Girl on the Train is one of those malignant productions in which absolutely nothing works. The film’s central mistake is one of casting and performance, as superstar Emily Blunt is insultingly positioned as a signifier of discarded womanhood, playing drunkenness and embarrassment like, well, a rich and beautiful celebrity utterly unfamiliar with the tenets of humiliation and self-loathing. Blunt doesn’t dig into her character, she indicates, which affirms the endless indication of Tate Taylor’s blunt and witless direction. The Paula Hawkins novel that serves as the source material was a bald riff on Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl that more or less hit its marks. And so Taylor feels empowered to crib from David Fincher’s film adaptation of the source of Hawkins’s own pilfering, as well as from the work of other auteurs like Steven Soderbergh, aiming for the cinematic equivalent of a sleek yet lurid yuppie coffee-table book. He’s hopelessly out of his depth. Bowen


The 20 Worst Film Follies of 2016

Green Room

Genre “throwbacks” are at their worst when emptily imitating their predecessors, replete with winks and nods that, if taking a stab at horror, inevitably turn to guts and gougings. Such is the case with Green Room, an idea-free shocker that spends about 15 minutes characterizing the members of a punk band only to quickly turn them into shaking sacks of flesh after they’re left stranded at the mercy of Darcy (Patrick Stewart), a thinly drawn neo-Nazi. Writer-director Jeremy Saulnier has little interest in narrative texture; the script is configured with puerile bursts of violence, eye-rolling callbacks to unresolved stories, and numerous fake-outs, none of which deepen the film’s underlying interests in race, fear, or, um, music. Here’s a film that’s so chicken-shit, it has Darcy warn his gang about smoking “too much of that nigger dope” but then cowers away from any scenes depicting racial confrontation. Say what you want about Tarantino’s use of ethnic slurs, but at least he’s tackling the matter of race head-on and with tenacity. Saulnier wants the aura of provocation without the real mess of making racism into something more than just a premise. Dillard


The 20 Worst Film Follies of 2016

Hacksaw Ridge

Authenticity, as an argument for artistry, has been decimating discussions of popular culture at least since audiences lost their shit over Steven Spielberg’s depiction of the Omaha Beach landing in Saving Private Ryan just under 20 years ago. Words like “realistic,” “intense,” and “powerful” have become meaningless—and worse, thoughtless—designations of aesthetic importance, as if a filmmaker’s task were to actually burrow back in time and locate an unfiltered sample-size of Objectivity. Such notions misunderstand the fundamental rule of mediation 101: All films are representations and all films are political. No film this year more attempted to conceal those truths through a narrative bait and switch than Mel Gibson’s Hacksaw Ridge. This “true story” (its enthusiasts will ironically be sure to remind you of that) about a conscientious objector is merely a plotting ploy to license Gibson’s restaging of the Grand Guignol carnage from The Passion of the Christ, only this time with a baby-faced loverboy instead of Our Lord and Savior. Drenched in propagandistic conceptions of family, country, religion, and militarism, the film could just as easily be called God, Guns, Gore, and Gotcha. Dillard

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The 20 Worst Film Follies of 2016

Hillary’s America

Dinesh D’Souza preys on the clickbait-era feebleness of his perceived audience with Hillary’s America: The Secret History of the Democratic Party, a fundamentally incoherent and aesthetically barren harangue masquerading as a revisionist history lesson on the legacy of contemporary U.S. politics. D’Souza utilizes a single voice or case study as evidence of both incontrovertible fact and widespread practice, solemnly nodding as his interviewees divulge one “revelation” after another, but it’s clearly all a sham, primarily because the director, who appears on screen throughout, rarely asks questions of his subjects, instead leading them with “Tell me about…” at every turn. The jig is so transparent that one can almost feel D’Souza mouthing just off screen the obviously scripted dialogue along with his subject. Dillard


The 20 Worst Film Follies of 2016

Independence Day: Resurgence

Like many of Roland Emmerich’s disaster epics, Independence Day: Resurgence assembles a variety of thin character sketches, pitting several pairs of unconnected stereotypes against an apocalypse, busily cross-cutting between them and fashioning an endless series of redundant starts and stops. In a characteristically reductive contrast, a white American nerd (Nicolas Wright) teams with a black tribesman (Deobia Oparei) who stands in for all of Central Africa because that part of the world is, per standard American blockbuster implication, a singular, undifferentiated mass of unfamiliar customs. Rounding out the 1990s-era blockbuster nostalgia package, there’s also a plucky love interest, several imperiled children, a lovable dog, and Judd Hirsch doing his obnoxious “old Jewish man” routine, which reaches its nadir when his character says something along the lines of “What? It takes an alien invasion to get you to visit your father?” Bowen


The 20 Worst Film Follies of 2016

Ithaca

Armed with decades of acting experience, a rolodex full of high-profile industry colleagues, and the rights to a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, Meg Ryan enjoyed plenty of advantages in making Ithaca, her directorial debut, so while it would be unfair to expect her to produce a masterpiece her first time out, the total ineptitude on display here is still genuinely stunning. The film is confused in conception, dreary in execution, and completely lacking in forward momentum. Scenes drag on with no sense of purpose, while the actors generally seem lost. The overall effect is like watching an early rehearsal for a play, when the rhythms of a scene haven’t yet been established and the actors are still finding their characters. Watson


The 20 Worst Film Follies of 2016

Jackie

Forget “post-truth.” “Anti-biopic” is the new term that gets our epic side eye. Pablo Larraín’s alternately ghoulish and regressive Jackie garnered raves for expanding the parameters of that most boringly traditional and Oscar-wooing of genres, as though literally every single biopic from the last 15 years hasn’t also sought methods to keep the genre’s many pitfalls at bay. Failing to distinguish itself from all other historical drag revues of late, Jackie indulges in the hoary strategy of placing an iconic figure from a global event under the microscope, in order to give its central actor a chance to flex her muscles against the binds of mimicry. And struggle Natalie Portman does, unbearably for those who recognize this breed of performance as prestige cinema’s true uncanny valley, but attractively to the type of filmgoer who assesses cognitive dissonance as evidence of praiseworthy thespian efforts. The elements that do work (Mica Levi’s sensual score, first and foremost) only confirm the film’s status as a luscious department-store window display. Enfant terrible Xavier Dolan took the opportunity to declare himself “artistically intimidated” by the film, which makes some sense in light of his “lady doth protest too much” self-identification as a strict top. In divorcing history from context, Jackie willfully lays on its back, inviting those who prefer injecting their own meaning amid red-satin drapery. Eric Henderson

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The 20 Worst Film Follies of 2016

Keeping Up with the Joneses

The saddest thing about Keeping Up with the Joneses is that it appears sincere in its attempt to fill the comedy void that only the filmmakers thought was left by Desperate Housewives. Wisteria Lane is now Maple Circle, where two government spies, Natalie and Tim Jones (Gal Gadot and Jon Hamm), move to in order to ingratiate themselves with Jeff Gaffney (Zach Galifianakis), a security company drone whose computer holds intel about an arms transaction. Natalie and Tim’s poker faces may indicate how inherently good they are at protecting their secret identities—or they could point to Gadot and Hamm’s resignation over the screenplay never rising above cataloging the expected outcome of Mr. and Mrs. Smith clones shooting their way through a Hollywood backlot version of flyover-country suburbia. Gonzalez


The 20 Worst Film Follies of 2016

King Cobra

Considering that King Cobra takes place in the mid-aughts, the possibilities for a nostalgic playfulness around Web 1.0 pornography could have been plentiful. Instead, the filmmakers soak their characters in a one-dimensional bathos devoid of any stylistic fun, feeding them trite lines (“You’re gonna be a star, I have a feeling”) in a silly premise involving jealousy and trademark, and timidly refrain from any form of critique or unapologetic devotion to the ridiculousness of the subject matter. Were it not for its (uninventive) sex scenes, King Cobra could have easily been a made-for-TV production. It’s difficult, in fact, to find a reason for the film’s existence beyond a spoiled platform for James Franco’s ersatz boldness. Diego Semerene


The 20 Worst Film Follies of 2016

Lazy Eye

Lazy Eye, which begins with sex and ends with post-coital guilt, presents us with an implausibly moralistic world where seasoned gay men are naïve, clingy, impossibly romantic, and completely offended by the concept of unfaithfulness, as well as cigarette smoking. Within the logic of the film, settling into an airtight monogamy, ideally with children, is the ultimate goal for the properly prudish post-9/11 homosexual, for whom sex is inevitably marred with anxiety and guilt and a second home is a sort of compensation for the lack of a second lover. Even an instance of shade in this world is tainted with sanctimony, as when Dean (Lucas Near-Verbrugghe) chastises Alex (Aaron Costa Ganis) for daring to be single and still not a homeowner: “It’s hard to have a kid if you’re not settled.” Semerene


The 20 Worst Film Follies of 2016

Life, Animated

Life, Animated has a fundamental stake in affirming its subject matter: a family who uses Disney animated features as a therapeutic tool for their autistic son. Since director Roger Ross Williams never introduces a figure that asks whether Owen Suskind’s condition could see similar progress by memorizing, say, the plays of William Shakespeare or any number of millions of other potential sources for therapeutic use, the doc indulges a particularly deplorable form of brand allegiance, one which blankly replicates the tribulations of a Disney narrative as the very conditions informing Owen’s ongoing struggle. When Owen describes himself as “the protector of the sidekicks,” referring to his empathy for several of Disney’s supporting characters, it’s clear Owen has no protector. In the end, Williams stages a scene of Owen sitting in an empty auditorium as a Regal theater-chain employee, sporting a shirt with both a Regal logo and a Coca-Cola ad while watching a Disney film. Call it Life, Capitalized. Dillard

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The 20 Worst Film Follies of 2016

Man Down

If, for some reason, you’ve ever yearned for the emotional dimensions of a war vet’s PTSD to be reduced to A Beautiful Mind-style twist, look no further than Dito Montiel’s Man Down. Gabriel Drummer (Shia LaBeouf) is a U.S. Marine who’s haunted by the atrocities he committed in Afghanistan, and whose angst is ultimately cheapened by a well-intentioned but tasteless gimmick. Even worse is that Montiel barely commits to this narrative trickery: Most viewers will be able to guess within the film’s first 15 minutes that all those scenes that appear to take place in a post-apocalyptic United States—in which Drummer and his best friend, Devin Roberts (Jai Courtney), try to find and rescue both Drummer’s wife, Natalie (Kate Mara), and son, Johnathan (Charlie Shotwell)—aren’t real, because everything about the environment is rendered in a manner too blatantly artificial for it to be anything other than a character’s mental projections. This only makes the “gotcha” unveiling of that supposedly mind-blowing revelation about 20 minutes toward the end even more irritating in the filmmakers’ apparent cluelessness. Kenji Fujishima


The 20 Worst Film Follies of 2016

Mr. Church

Bruce Beresford’s Mr. Church is remarkable for how it manages to indulge so many offensive and shopworn clichés at once. A risible example of the magical negro trope, Henry Church (Eddie Murphy) appears in the lives of Marie (Natascha McElhone) and her daughter, Charlotte (played as a girl by Natalie Coughlin, then as a teenager and adult by Britt Robertson) as if out of the ether. Marie has been given six months to live from breast cancer and Henry, it turns out, has been hired by the woman’s deceased ex-lover to be the mother and daughter’s personal cook. More galling than Mr. Church’s litany of melodramatic banalities is its regressive view of race relations, and its obliviousness to it. This becomes especially laughable in the film’s homestretch. Not only do the filmmakers make Mr. Church’s hold over Charlotte so complete that she absorbs his talent for cooking and playing the piano, but they even wheel in a character to pat him on the back for his instruction: “He was a whole lot of magic.” Fujishima


The 20 Worst Film Follies of 2016

The Unspoken

Though it bears no discernible relation to its plot or themes, The Unspoken is a rather appropriate title for Sheldon Wilson’s limp haunted-house story, as the name is every bit as generic as the film itself. Set in a country house that’s lain abandoned for 17 years after the family that lived there mysteriously disappeared, The Unspoken offers up the usual haunted happenings—loud noises, objects flying around of their own accord—without any panache or personal stamp. Wilson’s approach is to deploy as many tried-and-true horror elements as he can think of—creepy kid, haunted house, satanic iconography, a bunch of jump scares—and just trust that something will stick. The problem is that he simply doesn’t have the chops to pull off any of these elements individually, much less to merge them into a coherent whole. Watson


The 20 Worst Film Follies of 2016

Yoga Hosers

The second in writer-director Kevin Smith’s projected Canada-set “True North” trilogy after 2014’s seriocomic horror yarn Tusk, Yoga Hosers tells an extravagantly ridiculous tale that accommodates everything from a Manitoban Nazi to crudely animated sentient pieces of German-accented, mountie-dressed talking bratwurst (called, naturally, “Brat-zis”). Smith also lards the film up with lame Canadian caricatures, frequent bathroom humor, and tired bits of satire, all aimed at the millennial set, revolving around such things as the supposed pretentiousness of yoga. This is the kind of film that considers myriad instances of Canadians saying “aboot” and a knockoff of Lucky Charms called Pucky Charms to be the epitome of wit. Fujishima

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