(10) Landline
Landline is a bunch of unlikable a-holes screaming at each other for two hours and doing terrible, unforgivable things to one another. If I were to be approached by someone resembling any of the characters in this film, I would run away as fast as possible. Jenny Slate gives one of the worst performances of the year which is especially disappointing since she showed true acting chops in the wonderful and sadly little seen drama Gifted in the same year.
(9) Wilson
Incredible talent such as Woody Harrelson, Laura Dern, Judy Greer, Brett Gelman, Margo Martindale and Cheryl Hines came together to make Wilson, a thoroughly unpleasant alleged comedy that I forgot about the second I left the theater. This film escapes the mind so quickly that it feels like even more of a waste of time than something that actually has the potential to get a viewer actively riled up. Roger Ebert once called the Michael Keaton comedy The Squeeze "chewing gum for the mind." If he were alive today, he would have had to pass that honor onto Wilson.
(8) Mother/Suburbicon/Downsizing
The first concerning trend this year is a trilogy of Paramount Pictures releases that tried to bring the arthouse to the mainstream. I think Universal did this better in 2017 with the reviled The Snowman (a film I happened to enjoy.) Here are three films that would be bad enough on their own if the marketing wasn't hiding what they really were. With the completely false marketing, however, they reach a new level of shameless. The worst part about these films all coming out within months of one another is that their low quality and even lower box office intake will make it even harder for directors with genuine talent to pitch their original film ideas to big studios.
(7) Wonder Wheel
Let's put aside the accusations against Woody Allen for a few minutes and just embrace how unbelievably boring and unpleasant Wonder Wheel is. This film is the equivalent of someone coming out to you once the movie starts and chloroforming you. It is so incredibly boring and unpleasant that there were about 20 times that I almost got up and left and yet it's only number seven on my list. As if I have to tell you this---never, ever, ever watch this garbage.
(6) The Ottoman Lieutenant/Bitter Harvest/The Promise/Queen Of The Desert
The other awful trend in 2017 films---taking genuinely interesting pieces of history and turning them into dull love triangles. These four films are so bad and so mind numbingly stupid and so uninteresting that typing their titles out once again isn't even worth it. What's especially sad is that all four directors (Joseph Ruben, Terry George, George Mendeluk and Werner Herzog) have proven to be incredibly talented men behind the camera. How they wound up with such utter crap is beyond me.
(5) Valerian And The City Of A Thousand Planets
Okay, Valerian And The City Of A Thousand Planets did look kinda cool. However, when I want nothing more than to leave the theater and get away from two of the worst, most annoying characters in film history, something is seriously wrong with your film.
(4) Rough Night
I'm an easy critic when it comes to comedies. I'll laugh at just about anything. I find all five of the leads in Rough Night to be incredibly funny women. However, I let out one muddled laugh during the entire 105 minutes of this dreadful comedy and that was from a cashier who's in the film for two seconds who's not even in the main plot. Raunchy humor can be extremely funny if done well but it's not enough to have jokes about how one bachelorette brought along stuff shaped like the male anatomy if you're not going to do anything else with that.
(3) The Emoji Movie
Low hanging fruit to be sure but The Emoji Movie is such an incredibly cynical cash grab that it has to be on this list. A film that hates children, adults, animals, trees and any other breathing organism, this is a cheap and lazy effort that proves there's plenty of room in Hollywood for absolute crap that no one (and I mean no one) could possibly enjoy.
(2) Life
To be clear---I was bored out of my mind by Alien Covenant. However, at least that film managed to try something a little bit different. Life does nothing new with the space genre and is content being a painful and bland rehash of much better films. This is Alien if it were made by Uwe Boll.
And the worst film of 2017 is....
(1) Justice League
This year, we had Wonder Woman, which I didn't like but at least that felt like a real film. Justice League has no personality, no conceivable plot, no real characters, nothing to make the audience want to sit and watch even a minute of it and I'm still not sure that it even exists. How could such a dreadful film be made? How could a villain that looks like a piece of CGI poop be created in the 20th century? Watching Justice League only serves as a reminder that there's way too many good movies in the world to give any attention to so called movies like this.
