DrogeMiester's Top 10 WORST Movies of 2017

At the beginning of this past weekend, I posted my list of favorite movies of 2017. Now it's time to finish 2017 off with my list of least favorite movies of 2017. I briefly mentioned in my favorite movies of 2017 list that I didn't see every movie in 2017. That is especially true with this list. There's a lot of really bad movies that I simply chose not to see and I don't feel bad about it. Yet as I skim over the movies that I skipped, most of them include raunchy comedies that no liked that I have zero interest in subjecting myself to ("CHiPs," "Snatched," "Baywatch," "Rough Night"), low-budget horror movies that no one liked, made solely to earn a few bucks ("The Bye Bye Man," "Rings," "Wish Upon," "Flatliners," "Jigsaw") or sequels in franchises that I have less than zero interest in ("Underworld: Blood Wars," "Resident Evil: Final Chapter," "Fifty Shades Darker," "Smurfs: The Lost Village," "Nut Job 2: Nutty by Nature," "Pitch Perfect 3"). So the following is a fairly accurate list of the worst movies of the year out of the ones I decided to give a chance to. But if you want to simply call it "10 bad movies that Adam saw this year," then I'm cool with that. I do think that 2017 was a good year for the most part. But here are the highlights of the stumbling blocks that we had to get through along the way.

10- Transformers: The Last Knight

The fifth Transformers movie was Michael Bay's "screw you" to the world. I'm sure he knows exactly why everyone hates his movies, but the previous two movies, "Dark of the Moon" and "Age of Extinction," both made over $1 billion worldwide, so I honestly think Michael Bay just didn't give a crap about what people thought because his horrific movie-making formula was consistently bringing in the big bucks. So is it surprising that "The Last Knight" delivers the exact same pile of stinky, rotten crap that everyone has been complaining about with this franchise in the last 10 years? No, it's not. Because Michael Bay doesn't care. I just gain comfort in knowing that Michael Bay's plan backfired this time around as the world witnessed this movie and said "screw you" right back to Michael Bay as "The Last Knight" made far less money than the previous two, getting only $130 million domestically and $605 million worldwide. And if this team continues to make no effort in improving this franchise, those numbers will continue to fall. The only reasons why "The Last Knight" isn't higher on this list is that it's better than "Age of Extinction," even though that's not saying much, and I wasn't angry at it after watching due to me not expecting anything from it.

9- The Greatest Showman

It's been a long time since I've had this strong of a disconnect with ALL my friends and family. I promise I'm not trying to purposely be controversial here. I genuinely hated this movie. It's one of the worst musicals in recent memory. Not only does the storyline manage to be extremely generic and cliche, but it also goes in a thousand different directions as it lacks any sort of focus or coherency. How do they manage to tape this mess of a story together? With music. The music in a musical is supposed to enhance your experience. That doesn't happen here. Instead the music is used to bandage everything together as every song takes you from Point A to Point Z. I felt cheated. My music blog forced me to revisit the most popular songs from the musical when they showed up on the Billboard Hot 100 and, in addition to said songs being used poorly, they are all generic and meaningless, highlighted by the worst of the bunch, "This is Me," which is a generic empowerment anthem written by two privileged white guys who have never been oppressed in their lives. The lyrics definitely show. Top all of that off with the fact that the movie is a complete and utter lie when it comes to the actual story of P.T. Barnum, which I could've forgiven if the movie itself was worth anything.

8- The Boss Baby

One thing that definitely stood out to me when it comes to the worst of 2017 was the extreme lack of quality when it came to animated movies. There were obvious exceptions to that, like "Coco," "Your Name." and "The LEGO Batman Movie," but "The Boss Baby" is the first of THREE animated movies on this list. And that's with me leaving off "Despicable Me 3," "Cars 3" and "The LEGO Ninjago Movie," all of which were worthy contenders. When it comes to DreamWorks Animation, they've always been hit and miss for me, but rarely have they had as big of a miss as "The Boss Baby." In trying to cleverly answer the question of where babies come from, we have what ends up being "Baby Geniuses" meets a painfully obvious rip-off of "Toy Story," all of which seems like it was written by a group of 7-year-olds with a plot that somehow manages to be extremely confusing and super cliche. The trailers looked awful. I almost skipped the movie altogether, only seeing it because it made a ton of money. I was embarrassed to asked for a ticket. And I wanted to walk out while watching because I was writhing in pain the entire time. It made the kids in my theater laugh, but half of that was because of all of the butt, poop and fart jokes littered throughout. 

7- The Circle

Sometimes I watch a movie and become baffled as to how such highly talented actors can look at a script for a movie and agree to be a part of it anyways, despite it being painfully obvious that there was never anything here to begin with. Sure, I suppose it's a decent idea to have a movie that showcases the potential hazards of social media and the internet, but it would have to be executed perfectly because we've had movies about the dangers of modern technology practically ever since they started making movies. It appears that this idea for "The Circle" never even translated to a decent screenplay because there is nothing here. The movie is as boring as tar. Tom Hanks, Emma Watson and John Boyega do the best with what they were given, outside Emma Watson proving yet again that she should just stop trying to pull off an American accent. But again, they were given nothing to work with. Nothing happens. I felt like I was being forced to tag along with this group as they moved forward with a boring day at a boring job for this stupid company that was obviously trying to replicate a modern social media, but failed to have any sort believability. These three certainly weren't in need of a quick paycheck, so why'd they take it? Did they all lose a bet? 

6- Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets

Or, as I like to call it, "Valerian and the City of a Thousand Jar Jars." Director Luc Besson has a decently impressive filmography, so it's typically not hard to get me excited for one of his films, at least when it comes to his directing credits. And I was intrigued by the idea that he'd wanted to do a Valerian movie for a long time as he grew up reading the French comics "Valerian and Laureline," which were released initially in 1968. But my conclusions here are that he loved those comics so much that instead of picking one of them to adapt, he chose ALL of them as we get a plot that goes in a thousand different directions with way too many subplots and a run time of 137 minutes that literally felt 45 minutes too long. Dane DeHaan and Cara Delevigne have zero chemistry, creating one of the most awkward romances I've witnessed recently. And of course we have my adjusted title because we have so many different space creatures crammed in, all of which annoyed the crap out of me like Jar Jar did for most people in the prequels. The one thing everyone else seemed to agree on were the stunning visual effects. I don't know. Maybe my theater showed a different version of the movie because I thought the movie looked and felt like a really bad video game.

5- The Star

Next up we have our second animated movie of this list, and the first of two animated movies from Sony Pictures Animation. Now I don't necessarily mind there being yet another movie telling the story of the Nativity. It's a story I enjoy that I obviously think has a great message behind it. But yet we've had so many movies about various parts of Christ's life that I often wonder why we're getting yet another one when something like this shows up on the schedule. But it's whatever. If they do a good job telling the story, then I can give it a pass. And that's the problem with "The Star." Did anyone on Earth really want a movie about the Nativity from the perspective of the animals? Even though unique perspectives of the Nativity have worked in the past, I really have no idea what Sony was thinking with this one or how this specific screenplay even passed the board room meetings. Not only does the movie completely twist the story of the Nativity itself, but every time we switched to the animals in the movie, which happened to be most of the movie, they successfully drove me completely crazy. I wanted all of the animals to be captured by the bad guys and served up for Christmas dinner. Not something I should ever desire out of my main characters.

4- A Cure for Wellness 

Here's a movie that came out in mid-February that most people have completely forgotten about. And rightfully so. It's final box office total came in at just $8 million domestically and $26 million worldwide. The only reason why I saw it was for the off chance it happened to end up like "Shutter Island," a movie it was obviously trying to replicate as both are mystery thrillers where someone goes to investigate a mysterious place isolated from the rest of the world. And despite a good score and good cinematography, "A Cure for Wellness" fails on every level. It's not very mysterious as you have this place figured out as well as our villains fairly quickly into the movie. The thrills in the movie aren't very exciting either. But where this movie really rubbed me the wrong way was when we revealed the secrets of this place. And as a warning, I'm going to spoil this. Long story short, a guy falls in love with and marries his sister, potentially against her will. She's infertile, but he gets her pregnant through various experiments, but is found out and the sister is burned alive. But the fetus somehow survives, so the dude spends the next 200 years figuring out how to extend life and attempts to marry and rape this daughter when she finally comes of age before being stopped by Dane DeHaan. It's all disgusting and disturbing. I really don't know what Gore Verbinski was thinking here.

3- Daddy's Home 2

I spent two years avoiding this franchise after "Daddy's Home" came out at the same time as "The Force Awakens" and I just didn't care enough to go see it. But the franchise was haunting me ever since, so I watched both of them back to back when "Daddy's Home 2" was released and both of them have similar problems. They can't decide if they want to be family comedies or adult comedies, so instead this hits the awkward PG-13 comedy status that's too raunchy for kids, but too juvenile for adults. They also can't decide if they want to be a serious drama or an over-the-top slapstick comedy, so the movies end up being both and thus subsequently neither. Watching both of these movies back to back gave me a huge headache due to the overdose of unintelligent filmmaking. Specifically with "Daddy's Home 2," since sequels always have to be bigger and better, instead of simply following the Mark Wahlberg vs. Will Farrell arc of the first, we introduce the dads of both, adding in Mel Gibson and John Lithgow. Thus we have double the dads, double the plot lines and double the headaches for me as this movie had absolutely no idea who or what to focus on in this extremely unfunny, confusing movie that doesn't know who the target audience is or what tone to take the movie. And all the jokes from the first, which weren't funny to begin with, are lazily copied and pasted.

2- The Snowman 

I honestly think "The Snowman" is a modern marvel of a film. For all the wrong reasons. As in I truly marvel about how this final product came to be. The movie is based on a very popular series of murder mystery thrillers. We have a top-notch director in Tomas Alfredson and a top-notch executive producer in Martin Scorsese who wanted to direct this initially. We have a very talented cast, led by Michael Fassbender and Rebecca Ferguson. We also have a top-notch crew all around with the editors, cinematographer and composer. There was no reason to believe this wasn't going to at least be a decent thriller. But not only is this a bad movie, this is an unfinished movie. After this movie was released and universally panned, Alfredson came out and said that they never even filmed 10-15 percent of this movie. How do you let that happen? And what were you filming instead? I heard about that before going in, but after watching this, I feel that he lowballed that estimate as it feels like only 10-15 percent of the movie was even filmed and that small amount of content somehow got stretched into two hours. I was stunned and left speechless after finishing this movie that I was really excited for and concluded that this was a cinematic disaster on the level of 2015's "Fant4stic."   

1- The Emoji Movie 

If you've followed this blog or talked to me at all this year, this selection should be the most unsurprising choice to you. I left "The Emoji Movie" feeling like it was the epitome of everything wrong with Hollywood in 2017. Sony has dipped so low into the pool of ideas that they made a movie based on the emojis in your phone. Sony got so desperate to follow current trends that they tried to set up a Smartphone Cinematic Universe. The world of this movie is called Textopolis and the plot is the most disgustingly obvious ripoff of "Wreck-It Ralph" and "Inside Out," but does absolutely nothing right. The movie is not funny. The movie has no depth. The movie has no redeemable characters. The movie is loaded with poop jokes and puns. The movie teaches the message that texting is better than talking to someone in person. Like, seriously. I did not laugh once. Nothing moved me. Nothing entertained me. I hated every minute of this movie and am beyond furious that this embarrassment of a film exists in our world. And to top everything off, the movie was unable to entertain its target audience of young kids. I have not talked to one young kid who enjoyed it and I have never been to a kids movie where the kids in the screening seemed more bored.