Almost to the end, folks. But before we finally recap the best (or, err, my favorites) of 2012, let's take a pit stop to discuss what are arguably the worst films of 2012. Now as always, I can't presume that I've seen every probable terrible movie out there (I generally avoid Adam Sandler comedies and didn't catch Parental Guidance in time), but I tried to highlight films that were both very bad and whose respective failures meant something more than just their artistic inadequacy. As always, the films below are in alphabetical order. So, without further ado, let's dive in!Alex Cross:
To William Hurt in A History of Violence, "How to do you f*** that up?!" You have a long-running detective series filled with larger-than-life villains and often insanely over-the-top violence. You have Tyler Perry, if perhaps cast against type than at least hungry to prove that he can do something different. You have Matthew Fox theoretically willing to chew up every bit of available scenery. And you have audiences primed for a kind of old-school adult-skewing genre picture that the previous two Morgan Freeman-starring Alex Cross films (Kiss the Girls and Along Came A Spider) represented back in the 1990s. How in the world do you make this film this incredibly boring? First of all, you take an explicitly R-rated story and neuter it into a still-inappropriate PG-13. Then you pile on generic cliche on top of generic cliche. Then you instruct every actor other than Fox to be as lifeless as possible. Finally, you never decide to make a down-to-Earth crime thriller or a would-be superhero/super villain story. The end result is a painfully dull would-be thriller that can't hold a candle to the most average episode of Criminal Minds.
In the face of two relatively non-mighty openers, The Dark Knight Rises (
For those who wonder why I go out of my way to praise the Dreamworks Animation library, even the Madagascar films, you might want to sample Ice Age 4: Continental Drift. I'm not going to do a full review, but it's pretty terrible, a paint-by-numbers narrative (overprotective dads, boy-crazy teenage girls, damsels-in-distress, etc.) that makes Madagscar 3: Europe's Most Wanted look like The Incredibles. With another overseas haul over $225 million before the film even touches US shores, there is a good chance that the series will actually produce more sequels than The Land Before Time (13 chapters, natch). I made a comment yesterday, sight as-of-yet-unseen, that the Ice Age series was basically the Final Destination series of animation. In that I meant that both the first Ice Age and the first Final Destination films were real movies, they were thoughtful, character-driven dramas that were surprisingly somber and meditative about their core subject: death. Final Destination 2-5 and Ice Age 2-4 may have been cartoon-ish and paper-thin crowd-pleasing entertainments, but the first installments had depth, meaning, and genuine emotional engagement. They were real films.
