The 18 Worst Movies of 2017

Rory Cashin

It was a good year for bad movies.

There are a few different kinds of bad movies. There’s the disappointingly bad, as in the movies you were looking forward to, and then they came out, and they really let you down, almost on a personal level.

There’s the so-bad-they’re-almost-enjoyable bad, in which there is a paradoxical level of enjoyment to be had from watching them, but they are still fundamentally not a good movie.

And then there’s the kind of bad movie that never seemed like a good idea, from inception to creation, but the people behind it powered through until it hit the cinema screen, and you can almost feel the lack of effort, love or care for the project emanating from the film in front of you.

The following 18 movies represent each of these categories, starting with…

18. Transformers: The Last Knight

The reason this is so low (or high?) on this list is solely because we forgot it existed until it came time to make this list. It is maybe the worst of the Transformers movies to date, but it also the most forgettable, and that has got to stand for something.

17. The Great Wall

In a year when everyone is all too aware of white-washing, this might be the whitest washing of them all (sorry Ghost In The Shell, you don’t even win that award). Matt Damon and his time-share Irish accent are in China for reasons, when he ends up saving the country from monsters that were released by a comet… No, we didn’t dream this up, and somebody put $150 million into making this a reality. On the one hand, it is very pretty to look at. On the other hand, absolutely everything else about this movie is beyond awful.

16. Notorious

We were pretty clear about our feelings about Notorious when the movie came out in the first place, and considering everything that happened since then, this “documentary” existing as it does is even more baffling. This isn’t a movie, this is glorified CCTV footage of McGregor saying how great he is over and over again.

15. Geostorm

This movie is objectively terrible. It features Gerard Butler playing a space-scientist trying to stop terrorists from weaponising the weather. It features a scene in which the population of Dubai must escape a freezing tidal wave. Tidal waves aren’t caused by weather, they’re caused by earthquakes. Science isn’t this science-movie’s strong suit. So yes, it is a terrible movie. But the kind of terrible you can’t help but enjoy. But still terrible.

14. King Arthur: Legend Of The Sword

It was a somewhat decent idea, to cash in on that Lord Of The Rings / Game Of Thrones money pit by updating King Arthur. Making it a prequel featuring giant elephant monsters and psychic squid ladies was … questionable. Casting charisma black-hole Charlie Hunnam in the lead and giving him Lock Stock-dialogue to play with was the problem.

13. Fifty Shades Darker

Better than Fifty Shades Of Grey, which is something, mostly thanks to an out-of-nowhere modicum of self-awareness. At this rate, 2018’s Fifty Shades Darker might miss the Worst Of The Year lists altogether. Keep up the good work.

12. Kidnap

Halle Berry’s child is kindapped. Halle Berry spends the rest of the movie chasing after the car that her kidnapped child is in, while effectively talking to herself. When she’s not talking to herself, she’s screaming at herself. Halle Berry is a Best Actress Oscar Winner.

11. Flatliners

We knew there was a problem with this movie when the trailer hadn’t appeared until really close to when the movie actually came out. Despite the decent cast, and the still-decent idea pushing the original horror movie forward, this is a lazy remaquel (not quite a remake/not quite a sequel) that is more concerned with being cool than being scary.

10. Underworld: Blood Wars

Somehow, inexplicably, there have been five of these, and somehow, equally inexplicably, they managed to get Kate Beckinsale back into the super-tight leather cat-suit to shoot more werewolves in the face. However, despite the epically awful script and “What is exactly is going on here?” action sequences, the film managed to make back THREE TIMES its budget at the box office. So if we get a sixth one of these, you’ve got no-one to blame but yourselves.

9. The Book Of Henry

Apparently this movie’s awfulness was one of the primary factors as to why the director was fired from Star Wars Episode IX.

8. The Snowman

We put together a bit of a breakdown on all the way this bizarrely terrible movie is very much worth your time, which you should check out here, because it really does deserve some kind of cinematic autopsy, in an attempt to figure out how something with so much potential went so far off the rails.

7. Fist Fight

Charlie Day in It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia is a modern comedic genius, a total live-wire, kinetic ball of energy that could go anywhere, and often does. Pairing him up with the stone-faced Ice Cube could have worked, had they not required Day to play the pinned-down straight-man to Cube’s “hilarious” antagonist. It also doesn’t help that they didn’t give either of them any jokes, or any real direction for the entire movie. Too often we get the feeling the director just shouted “Action!” and let everyone do what they wanted and hoped it would all work out in the editing room later on. Spoiler: it didn’t.

6. The Dark Tower

In the year when Stephen King watched It go from strength to strength, he had to see another of his beloved stories crash and burn on the big screen. The pairing of Idris Elba and Matthew McConaughey is a fantastic one, but they’ve been placed into a 90-minute film based on a series of books longer than re-reading The Bible three times over. The definition of wasted potential.

5. Daddy’s Home 2

We love Will Ferrell. We love Mark Wahlberg. But we did not love Daddy’s Home 2, which makes the original look like a modern comedy classic in comparison. A weird combination of championing fire-arms, sexualising children (seriously), and defending incest (we’re not kidding), just about any joke can be forgiven if it is funny. Which this wasn’t.

4. The Emoji Movie

Ban this sick filth.

3. The Bye Bye Man

In what has got to be one of the worst names for a movie ever, this is a “horror” movie about a monster who kills you if you think or say his name. Mixing in bits from Final Destination, Candyman and A Nightmare On Elm Street, stealing plot points but leaving behind any idea of scares, we totally understand there are some young, impressionable actors out there who need to make a living and got their start in this abysmal film – even Leo DiCaprio starred in Critters 3. But how they managed to get normally-very-good actors like Carrie Anne Moss and Faye Dunaway involved is beyond us.

2. CHiPS

You know that joke in Rick & Morty, when Jerry finds out that in alternative reality he’s actually a big-time Hollywood star, but then the Inter-Dimensional Cable shows him a trailer for Last Will & Testimeow: Weekend At Dead Cat Lady’s House II, and Jerry responds “I wrote AND directed that?” This must be how Dax Shepard feels about CHiPS, except he wrote AND directed AND starred in it. It isn’t just not funny, it is almost aggressively unfunny.

1. Rings

This came out way back in January, and has remained the worst movie of the year for the following 12 months. This do-nothing, mean-nothing, is-nothing horror movie managed to not only kill the franchise dead, but also somehow made the previous, better movies a little bit worse just by association. The idea of sticking the killer seven days video online and making it viral is a decent one, and there was certainly plenty of mileage to get out of the idea, which is why it is so perplexing that everyone involved in the script and direction decided to ignore all that and just make one of the worst horror movies of all time instead. And not even in a so-bad-it’s-good Trolls 2 kind of way, more of a “I’m getting annoyed I spent my hard earned money on this, why won’t it just end already??” kind of way. Plus, it cost $25 million to make, but banked $83 million at the box office. There truly is no accounting for taste.