The Top 10 Worst Films of 2011

Ah, 2011. What a year it was. I could go on about major headlines from the past year, such as Occupy Wall Street, Charlie Sheen's meltdown or The Hobbit trailer. But, you don't come hear to learn and I don't write about those things. No, as is the part of the job, every film critic must list the best and worst films of the year. And this is no different. below are the 10 worst films to have crawled from sludge and somehow form a feature film. Tomorrow check back for the Top 10 best films. Now keep in mind, I don't see three movies a week, so I can only judge those I have seen.

10. Battle: Los Angeles
Kicking off the list is March's "summer blockbuster", Battle: Los Angeles. While not terrible, Battle is incredibly generic. The characters names might as well have been Marine #1 and Tough Girl #3. Hell, I don't remember them ever saying their names or me ever caring to find out. The film is really just a bore. It feels like you're watching your friend play a generic third-person shooter. The acting is decent, the writing is bland, the direction tries so hard to be Michael bay (who we'll meet later on). The one good thing about this movie is it does convey a large sense of scale when the aliens invade. Other than that, it's just a generic Michael Bay rip-off. And that's the worst kind of rip-off.

9. Take Me Home Tonight
Coming in at number 9, March's Take Me Home Tonight. Many of you probably forgot this film existed and with good reason. While, like Battle: LA, it's not that bad, it really isn't good either. The cast is giving it there all, but all the have to work with is a cheesy, cliched rom-com about the 80's. Dan Fogler tries too hard and is annoying. The pop culture references try to bury the weak plot. The movie is just filler. You put it on just to occupy your time. You forget about it and then move on with your lives.

8. The Green Hornet
This is the last one that really doesn't deserve to be on a worst list, but to get to 10, I had to include it. Last January's The Green Hornet tried to hard. it tried to be an action-comedy, a rom-com, a buddy-comedy, a mob flick, a superhero movie, a adaptation, a raunchy comedy. It even tried to be a Mythbusters episode. But it never worked. Everybody's clearly giving it their all, but the film's just messy, uninteresting and cliched. Director Michel Gondry, who direct one of my all-time favorite movies Be Kind Rewind, does add a level of visual flair, but the bad 3-D conversion really kills the movie's look. A nice effort, but better luck next time.

7. Cowboys and Aliens
This was the biggest disappointment of the year. If a movie is being directed by Jon Favreau, stars Daniel Craig, Harrison Ford and Olivia Wilde and is about cowboys fighting aliens, and it's boring, something has gone horrible wrong. The cast seems bored and in it for the paycheck. The aliens look generic, the plot is generic, hell, even the music was generic. The whole movie just isn't interesting. I never cared about the characters. i never cared what was going on. And I don;t even remember much of the movie. It goes on too long and offers so little in return. What the hell happened?

6. Dylan Dog: Dead of Night
Here's one I bet you haven't heard of. Dylan Dog is based off of an Italian comic book and starred Daniel Shaw himself, Brandon Routh. And I don't know what happened to him. I am one of the few who like Superman Returns. I thought his guest stint on Chuck was great. But, here, he just sucks. He is bland. hell, the whole movie is bland. It is easily the most boring movie of the year. It's cops and supernatural crap. How did that turn out to be so crappy? This one slipped by almost completely and thankfully, it probably won't get a sequel. Hopefully.

5. Season of the Witch
Do you know why studios pick certain movies to be put out in the January graveyard? It's usually the movies that the studios have no faith in and know won't do well critically or financially. Want to know a hint as to how you can spot if a movie's going to be released in January? Does it star Nicolas Cage? There you go. Now, don't get me wrong. I like Cage. It's just... does a movie starring Nicolas Cage in medieval times that follows him transporting a suspected witch to some monks even sound remotely good? Now it sounds boring, cliched and cheesy. And guess what? It was.

4. From Prada to Nada
Yet another movie you haven't heard of probably. It was also released in January, which as I said above, is always a good sign. I watched this movie solely to be able to put it on this list. I mean, a "modern-retelling" of Sense and Sensibility? Starring Alexa Vega? how could that be good? And it wasn't. the movies main stumbling point was it's characters. the two leads are complete morons, forgoing the people they love in order to "focus". Also, for a movie about Mexican pride, it was a little extremely racist toward Mexicans. A running joke is about how one character is suspected to be a thief  just because he's Mexican. The romance are so under developed that when a character's love interest proposes to her, it comes completely out of nowhere because they had only shared whole romantic moment in the entire hour and 45-minute runtime of the movie. I haven't even read Sense and Sensibility and I fell offended by how much it butchers the original.

3. Transformers: Dark of the Moon
Now we're getting into the big leagues. The third and unfortunately not final Transformers movie is Michael Bay's crapsterpiece. I like the first Transformers. Hell, I was willing to forget the second. But this was just too far. Over-long, over-complex, over-CGI, this was just a complete mess. The plot was dumber than the first two, which must be breaking some kind of laws of the universe. The character were even more one-dimensional. The actors have all given up. And no, the movie is "worth it" for the last half-hour. If a movie can't be entertaining all the way through, that bad enough. But the "killer" last half-hour is still stupid (the building just stops?), hard to see and ugly-looking. Bay has completely killed the Transformers series with this. But as word spread about him return for a fourth, I wonder, why is he mutilating the corpse?

2. Green Lantern
Man, Ryan Reynolds had a bad year. The Change-up bombed and Green Lantern became the laughing stock of the nerd and film community alike. Many people had their theories as to way this movie sucked so much, and I have mine. I think that, while Marvel embraces the fact that it's characters are superheroes in superhero movies, DC doesn't want to admit this. I mean, look at Christopher Nolan's Batman. I don't think superhero is every said once. And I think Green Lantern tried to follow it's lead. It did so many things to be different from other superhero movies. And look at how little of it worked. Mainly, the fact to make Lantern's suit fully-CGI may go down as the single dumbest movie-making decision of the last decade. For such a huge budget the special effects are some of the absolute worst ever. Nobody cared when they made this movie. And it shows. However, there was one film, one single film that was just slightly worse than Green Lantern.

And the #1 worst movie of 2011 is...

1. Limitless
Bet you weren't expecting this, were you? Now, I know a lot of people loved this film. Some are even putting this on their best lists. But for me personally, this movie had the worst script of 2011 and the rest of it wasn't very good either. The acting is fine and so is the music. But the directing and writing were just so bad. The directing just tries to distract you with all of the pointless zoom-ins and headache-inducing transitions. The writing is lazy and plot-hole ridden. What scene was better? The scene where he drank the blood to get the drug? Or the scene where an average everyday drug dealer can get the extremely powerful drug like NZT? My personal favorite is when Robert De Niro suddenly becomes a villain is the last 5 minutes of the film and our hero, who the entire point of his journey in the film is to cure him of the drug, tells us about how he cure himself, in the last two minutes of the film, with just a hand wave! While both this and Green Lantern were equally bad, the reason I put this above of Lantern was because Lantern alays looked crappy. Limitless looked pretty good and as such, was just a bigger disappoinment. Now, how was that for a twist ending?

Stay tuned tomorrow for the Top 10 Best Films of 2011!