The Five Worst Films of Spring 2009

Welcome back traditional Spring film season - how we missed you so. You remember don’t you, the times we used spend together? We’d take four months out of every year and just hang out, your weekly selection of Summer/Awards cast-offs and long delayed failures clogging up the local Cineplex with nothing but shoulder shrugging specials. This is the way it used to be, the way we film fans remember the span between January and May - before the blockbuster moves in and takes over the ticket line landscape. There’s no popcorn fare in your past - just lots and lots of ideas that got really, really lost in the tepid translation. Oh sure, you tried to pad your rep, resorting to surprise hits like 300 and Passion of the Christ to change your image. But now…now things are back to the way they used to be, and the feeling of familiarity is intoxicating.

Indeed, Spring 2009 was terrible, the overall perspective more mediocre than memorable. This was the time of Blart, of Mall Cops so warm and cuddly that they made the chunky in the demographic wet themselves, Susan Boyle style. It was the quarter of bad future shock (Push) and even worse action antics (Transporter 3, Dragonball Evolution). It was the period that gave us Inkheart, The Soloist, Sunshine Cleaning, and the piled up cordwood corpses of A Haunting in Connecticut. Not every offering was so horrific, but we did have to suffer through Hannah Montana’s movie, said series’ purity ring off-shoots, and the fourth Fast and Furious film. Things were so bad this time around that Tyler Perry’s latest, the hit and miss Madea Goes to Jail, was more satisfying than most of what came out of Tinsel Town’s tainted factory.

Still, there were five that really stood out, five that made their limited running time in the theater the cinematic equivalent of being waterboarded with Sean Hannity. Some of them were obvious from the minute they were announced - even a ‘minkey’ could see that. Others snuck up on you like unwelcome relatives at a social occasion. Eventually, it’s embarrassing for everyone involved. While we still have an astonishing nine more months until this year is officially over, one wonders how high up some of these turkeys will land come final annual aesthetic tally time. More disconcerting is the notion that, indeed, things can and WILL get worse. Let’s begin with:

Nothing sucks harder than sitting in the theater watching a supposedly suspenseful film and then realizing, halfway through, you remember the third act plot twist that’s still 20 to 30 minutes away. It’s all downhill from there - and that’s exactly what happened with this remake of the Korean hit The Tale of Two Sisters. Long before the dramatic denouement, this critic experienced the kind of narrative déjà vu you don’t want to have during a thriller. By the time of the reveal, he was practically screaming for the spoiler to show up and get it over with. The rest of the movie has a moody atmosphere that can only come from an older man sleeping with a much younger trophy wife, and the Hand that Rocks the Glass House Cradle conceits are truly dull and lifeless. Of the many wannabe fright flicks of the Spring, this was the most disappointing.

By its very definition, a romantic comedy has to have (a) romance, and (b) laughs. What this dreadful dissertation, based on that most elusive of literary sources - the self help book, has is lots of screaming women and their equally whiny weepy best friends. This is the kind of movie that, if it were possible, would have Susan B. Anthony and her fellow zombie suffragettes rising from the grave in order to stage posthumous protests. Nothing works - not the quasi-chemistry between to the onscreen lovers, not the male POV advice from a seemingly lost Justin Long, not the patented ditz of Drew Barrymore or the barely alive ennui of Jennifer Connelly - and that’s just the talent with their names above the credits. This film truly contains the single worst performance of 2009 so far - the cloying, cliché-filled failure that is Ginnifer Goodwin’s grating, borderline retarded Gigi. It’s a literal pain to watch.

Okay, here’s the deal. This is clearly the work of some insular geek who invests way too much time in Viking themed role playing games and not enough actually experiencing the real world. In between servings of Hot Pockets and mediocre science fiction, he dreams up this idea of an alien crash landing in the middle of a Nordic reenactment society, and then adds a glowing CG monster just to make things more “nerdgasm”-esque. Ew. That’s right, folks - a blink and you missed it affair starring Mel Gibson’s favorite big screen savior (James Caviezel), John Hurt, and Ron Pearlman - it was clearly paycheck cashing time all around. The only thing missing was Ben Kingsley and Uwe Boll’s name on the credits. Had any of the material come close to meeting the expectations of the D&D dork who dreamed it up, we could have had a guilty pleasure. All we wound up with was a bunch of Valhalla vomit.

Miley Cyrus may be the female equivalent of the entertainment antichrist, but these three losers from the rejected pages of a pedophile’s Tiger Beat truly wear the number of the beast, and it’s significantly less that 666 if you go by the box office. Bombs don’t thud quite as hard as this craven concert movie, especially when there was so much pre-publicity hype about how popular these wholesome rockers really were/are. Apparently, like their proposed talent, said build-up was all desperate House of Mouse smoke and mirrors. Some have argued that the movie’s box theatrical release comings can be linked to parents finally figuring out that the Jonases are nothing more than a way to sell sex to their pre-pubescent tween children. Of course, the fact that their tepid music blows donkey butt doesn’t mean anything, right? When The Monkees, Menudo, and The Banana Splits have more artistic integrity, you know you’re bound to fail.

This one is so bad, so egregiously awful, that the rest of the list looks like 2001, Citizen Kane, and The Dark Knight by comparison. Someday, perhaps when he’s dead, a tell-all tome will come out about Steve Martin, and at that time, the bile soaked grudge he has against the late, great Peter Sellers, and the reason he keeps pissing all over the man’s memory with a vengeance, will be revealed. There is no excuse for this film save for one - money. The first remake was an unfathomable hit, so following the Hollywood maxim, the more cash you make, the more copies you’ll create. Never mind that the script appears gleaned from a dozen dopey slapstick efforts, and Martin has aged out of his physical comedian shtick. The direction, by someone named Harald Zwart, takes every tired idea and drives it into the ground with the subtlety of a sledgehammer. And that’s just the tolerable bits.