The BP Ten Worst of 2015

This list was compiled from the individual bottom ten lists of Scott, Josh, Aaron, Rita, Craig, Sarah, Darrell, Alexander, Matt, Tyler, and David. Each film was weighted according to its placement on each individual list. As such, a film that appeared on only two writers’ lists could still wind up on the finalized list if it placed particularly high. Conversely, a film could conceivably be on everybody’s list, but not make the final list, due to low point value.

10. Walt Before Mickey

Walt Before Mickey is a dreadful film that is so fallaciously dulcet and saccharine it makes Hallmark originals look like sordid examinations of life’s pernicious underbelly in comparison. With Thomas Ian Nichols (whose performance is over-enthusiastic yet wholly uninspired) as Walt Disney before founding the Walt Disney Company (hence the film’s odious title), Walt Before Mickey lacks any kind of substance, lumbering through the proprietary defining moments of an ubiquitous life and career. A winking screenplay (Walt’s decision to wear his now iconic mustache is treated like Rocky Balboa climbing the steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art), a schmaltzy score and shot to look more like an inspirational greeting card than a film, Walt Before Mickey doesn’t manage to hit a single correct note. There’s nothing to hold onto, it’s too mawkish to be taken seriously and the cast (including Jon Heder, who delivers the worst performance of his career) are a collection of robotic props, navigating through a series of disjoined vignettes about Walt Disney, made whole only by the viewer’s requisite knowledge of the man he would eventually become. -CS

9. Truth

There’s something to be said for a central performance that galvanizes everyone around it into asking more of themselves, and something just as tragic about everyone else kind of shrugging and saying, “Well, she seems to have this under control.” As 60 Minutes producer Mary Mapes circa 2004, Cate Blanchett exhibits the striking sort of confidence women don’t often get to display in lead roles, relishing every second as she uncovers a hugely damning (and eventually, probably, falsified) record of preferential treatment granted to George W. Bush during his time in the Texas Air National Guard. She’s brash, intelligent, and in total command of every room she enters, even when sharing that room with the legendary newsman, and host of 60 Minutes, Dan Rather. As Rather, Robert Redford is more or less on amiable autopilot, but it’s supporting players Topher Grace, Dennis Quaid, and Elisabeth Moss who really drop the ball, never mind James Vanderbilt’s screenplay – which feels like it had every third page removed – or direction – which is basically featureless. When you’ve somehow convinced an actress as accomplished and capable as Moss to basically sit there and have things explained to her, you’ve might have done something really right behind the scenes, but everything wrong where it counts. That a film can feature such a compelling portrait of a strong woman at its center, yet treat every other woman so horribly, is a minor miracle of social conscience and a complete tragedy of basic dramatic writing. -SN

8. Mortdecai

2015 was a great year for spies at the cinema, with Bridge of Spies, The Man from U.N.C.L.E.,Spy, Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation, and even Spectre all providing good entertainment.Mortdecai, comedic star vehicle for Johnny Depp and a fake mustache, was not among them. IfMortdecai was made about seven years ago, it would have starred Mike Myers coming off ofThe Love Guru. It’s been a long, slow fall, but to see just how low Depp’s stock is right now is pretty incredible even as pundits thought he had a good shot at an Oscar nomination this year (for a different film on this list). When you strip away all the art dealer hijinks and incessant mustache jokes (honestly, with the amount of time they spend on it, the mustache probably should have received top billing), what remains is an unfunny, unoriginal, and incredibly sexist film—remember that misguided tweet featuring Olivia Munn? On the positive side, big ups to Paul Bettany, who delivers the film’s only good performance as the sidekick tough who seems to be the only actor around with an actual sense of humor. -AP

7. Fantastic Four

To say that the talents of all the people involved in making the 2015 reboot of Fantastic Four were wasted; is a colossal understatement. In a desperate grasp to keep the rights to “Fantastic Four” from going to Marvel, Twentieth Century Fox rebooted the franchise and hired some of Hollywood’s hottest young talent to play the titular characters. Sadly the film is an emotionless exercise that fails to flesh out the world or stories of the “four”. Miles Teller is cast as Reed Richards the nerdy genius that creates the machine that sends them to another dimension that ultimately gives them their super powers. The problem is the Teller is a very charismatic actor whose own natural charm keeps him from ever being convincing as a loner genius. Jamie Bell does his best with his six lines of dialogue while in human form, but his role is utterly pointless and he had nothing to do in the film. Michael B. Jordan brings his natural onscreen presence to Johnny Storm making him the most interesting character and the most fun to watch. Kate Mara does her best. The most compelling this about Sue Storm is her character’s story of being an orphan from Kosovo, but it is glossed over in a line of dialogue and not even treated as being interesting. The acting is the best it can be with this terrible script but the whole film feels rushed, lazy, and boring. The film isn’t completely without merit though. There are a few shots of Reed Richards before he can control is elastic super power that are borderline grotesque. And there are a few scenes with Victor VonDoom that are much darker than I expected. The only way I think this franchise could ever actually be as fun or engaging as other super hero franchises is if Twentieth Century Fox had the courage to make a hard-R rated version of Fantastic Four that really explores the horrific truth behind getting super powers and what the consequences of that could be on the people and the world around them. Sadly 2015’s Fantastic Four never comes close. -SB

6. Black Mass

After his warm, humanistic Crazy Heart earned Jeff Bridges an Oscar, Scott Cooper was seemingly granted free reign to just go ahead and make movies without a heart, a soul, or even a gut. His 2013 Out of the Furnace was a star-studded riff on the short film someone in your undergrad program was really proud of making, but the more accessible and successful Black Mass may actually be worse. Seemingly unable to draw his large cast together towards a consistency of performative tone, Cooper’s direction hides behind a form of authenticity only familiar to that creature who lives behind the dumpster in Mulholland Dr. Everything is terrible, all the time, and there’s only sweat and blood and grease and puke and I don’t even know what. Though Boston gangster James “Whitey” Bulger (Johnny Depp) is the supposed protagonist of this mess, shockingly few of the scenes actually assume his point of view. This is a fine enough storytelling device, employed to great effect in everything from Citizen Kane to The Grand Budapest Hotel, except Cooper apparently didn’t realize that when he read the screenplay. He’s making a Whitey Bulger movie, so Bulger must be our main guy! So he constantly reorients the perspective away from a given scene’s actual subject and towards Depp, whose years of playing cartoons seem to have finally consumed him and demolished whatever capacity for playing subtext he might have once had. Joel Edgerton’s crooked FBI agent seems eager to outdo him, while Benedict Cumberbatch, as Whitey’s politician brother, spends most of his screen time silently asking what he’s even supposed to be doing. A wealth of other talent provides a constant stream of heavily-accented toughies, whores, and hoodlums, and if one happens to fare better than the rest, it’s only because they’re not around long enough to be completely sabotaged. -SN

5. Me and Earl and the Dying Girl

Where to start? Well, first off, I want to point a finger at this sub-genre of pseudo-indie, cutesy dramedies, or “hipster cutsies” as I call them. You know, Juno, Perks of Being a Wallflower, Garden State, Me and You and Everyone We Know. Not exactly a list of greatest hits, but if your message is something along the lines of, “Embrace your quirks, it’s okay to be weird, you’re not alone”, that’s fine. But it feels like Me and Earl and the Dying Girl is saying, “Don’t be an insensitive jerk, it’s about a dying girl, oh, and there’s a lot of movie references”. You can find many flaws in this all too precious faux rom-com/coming of age story, but the most glaring flaw is that it’s just offensive. Remember when Chris Rock joked about having an Academy Award for Best Black Friend? Let’s just say CJ Cyler (Earl) would be a shoo-in. As a fan of movies, Me and Earl and the Dying Girl is especially bothersome with the onslaught of winks and nods at classic features. Having a brooding teenager watching The 400 Blows, talking about Herzog, and making spoofs of Michael Powell movies feels like a lazily conceived attempt to appear brainy or hip. It’s like the writers rattled off the Criterion Collection by spine number and used them as a syllabus for the various stale and unfunny parodies. Plus, watching every film deemed important by Criterion doesn’t make you an expert. It means you’re boring and unimaginative. Less of a movie and more of a cobbled batch of saccharine witticisms, Me and Earl and the Dying Girl is an exercise in spoon-fed manipulation. You can even break down the proceedings in the title; the ironic, self-deprecating hipster comedy (Me) the offensive black stereotype (Earl) and the transparent stakes of a Dying Girl. Tie all that together with some references to classic art films to win over the festival juries and you got yourself a title that swept up at Sundance. Frankly, it’s hard to decide on what’s worse: the film, or how many people fell for it? -AM

4. Do You Believe?

Clearly trying to be the Christian Crash – a dubious ambition if ever there was one – Do You Believe? epitomizes a very specific strain of faith-based film: the large ensemble. This allows the filmmakers to tell as many stories as they feel necessary, linked together by a common theme. However, while other Christian films may try to tackle specific spiritual issues, Do You Believe? is amorphous and unwieldy. The cast – complete with a few heavy hitters like Delroy Lindo and Mira Sorvino – does its best to bring the standard generic characters and bloviating dialogue to life, but the filmmakers’ attempts to reach anyone beyond the long-converted fall miserably short, ultimately creating a film that is so obvious in its pandering, not even the most faithful will come away feeling engaged. Even in the Christian film world, this film amounts to a shrug. -TS

3. Chappie

After District 9 become a surprise box office and awards hit (can you believe that film was nominated for Best Picture?), director Neill Blomkamp was destined to become the next great genre filmmaker. My, how perception has changed. After the insanely dull Elysium flopped, Blomkamp swung for the fences with Chappie, a mess of a movie that is both too similar to the A.I. masterpieces that came before it and too strange to cohere. For its sci-fi, it creates a very compelling character in Chappie—a wonderful piece of design and special effects—and then surrounds it with some of the stupidest, uninteresting, uncomplicated humans on the planet. And I’m not even talking about South African hip hop parody group Die Antwoord, who get more screen time than anyone could have expected. It’s a bold move to center much of the emotional stakes around these characters and then throw in heaps of self-reference and meta text, perhaps even a commendable one. But it is ultimately just too weird. Dev Patel, Hugh Jackman, Sigourney Weaver and the rest of the cast are too dull and too one-note to match the film’s otherwise manic tones. Chappie shows that Blomkamp isn’t afraid to stick to his guns, but this might be such a big misfire that he isn’t given any more ammo. -AP

2. The Danish Girl

Watching Tom Hooper’s The Danish Girl is like that feeling you get before letting out a big sneeze; it feels like the climax is approaching, but you’re left in an extremely uncomfortable position while waiting for it to happen. The film feels like a huge emotional rush is waiting just around the corner, slowly getting ready to jump out on its audience, allowing them to feel something, or at least, anything for these characters. Unfortunately, the importance of the film’s story never once translates emotionally onto its on-screen narrative. Hooper’s direction is slightly subtler and a little less visually annoying and clunky than his previous efforts, but this is little praise for a film conceptually suited to being so tender, so vulnerable, and so emotionally charged. The worse part of all is when you realize that Balem Abrasax (that’s Emperor of the House of Abrasax to you) from Jupiter Ascending is the main character; or, at least, thinks he is. It’s true, not only does Redmayne work surprisingly hard to belittle the mannerisms of a transgender woman (reducing almost every one of his physical movements to the most basic and stereotyped feminine characteristic), but he also, with help from the film’s script, misses entirely what should be the film’s main focus. The true ‘Danish girl’ of the film’s title is, in fact, Alicia Vikander, the character of whom not only loses the most from the film’s narrative but who also happens to be the sole character via which we established any connection to at all when attempting to find emotional relevance to the film. Instead, the entire thing turns into just another episode of ‘The Eddie Redmayne Show: with tonight’s special guest, Alicia Vikander’. More than anything is the fact that I’m just not that offended by the film, for to be offended would require me to actually care. -DT

1. War Room

A huge hit in the Christian film market, Alex Kendrick’s War Room still manages to bungle both the artistic and theological aspects of its story. It is a film ostensibly about the power of prayer, but the faith depicted is of the most generic variety, with simplistic characters spouting the broadest of Christian cliches and acting as though they are blowing the audience’s mind. This is highly unlikely, as the intended audience is already well-versed in Biblical concepts like prayer and unconditional love. However, the film so grotesquely whitewashes the difficulties of real life that even the most forgiving audiences will find anything in the film applicable to their own lives. In the end, the characters are weak, the story bloated and meandering, and the lessons muddled and childish. It’s not uncommon for a Christian film to be the worst movie of the year, and War Room easily demonstrates why. -TS