45. Soultaker (1990)
Soultaker makes little to no sense at all. Its premise is that there's this Angel of Death who looks like Martin Sheen (and yeah, it's his far less famous brother) who goes around taking people's souls when they die. Then this group of teenagers gets in a car accident and he's out to get them. Eventually there's only two teens left (exes, of course, who end up falling back in love) and they figure out that they're in comas and almost dead and will be dead if Martin Sheen gets their souls.
While at first it seems like a decent premise it just makes less and less sense as it goes on. And it's painfully obvious from the time they get to Summerfest that the film's budget is about as big as my month's grocery bill. The acting sucks, the pacing sucks, there's very little logic involved. I did enjoy one part though, when the girl was being stalked by her mother who turned into Martin Sheen. She was naked at the time and in a towel and then she went off running and was just all of a sudden fully clothed in the next shot. One of the most obvious continuity errors I've ever spotted, right up there with the infamous backwards/not backwards hat in that Stolen Summer bullshit we had to watch in Sacraments class sophomore year.
44. Jurassic Park III (2001)
I have already ripped this film a new asshole, not only as a sequel but as a standalone movie that sucks. But the painful reality is that I can never hurt this film nearly as much as it has hurt me. This shouldn't have really been a bad movie. It shouldn't have been made at all, but the budget was there and it should have at least been exciting and scary and have good visual effects. I don't know for sure because I'm too lazy to look it up, but I'd bet this probably has the 2nd highest budget of any film in this list, behind only The Day After Tomorrow, which at least gave what the viewer expected. This fails even as a dinosaur action movie because its special effects suck compare to the previous two films, despite a good deal more money being put into them.
I've already reviewed this film at length on this blog and I highly recommend you take a look at that because it articulates every detail as to why this movie sucks the big one. So I'm going to focus on one specific point. I apparently received a response--or dare I say retort--to a point I made in my review about the part where the velociraptors leave their Bond-villain trap to kill Tea Leoni and Billy and the guy from Fargo. Someone said that Michael Jeter's arm moved because he was never actually dead, the raptors left him alive to lure in the others. Now I'll admit this is feasible AT FIRST. But later on it shows a raptor take the dude's head in its mouth and snap his neck or something. please note that Jeter does not scream or wince or show any reaction to having his head inside a bloodthirsty maneating beast's head, though according to this response he had just voluntarily moved his arm not two minutes ago.
Fuck everyone involved with this movie. Whenever I want to gain faith back in the human race, this movie sinks into my subconscious and I know we're all hopeless again.
43. Terminator Salvation (2009)
Also known as Transformers, this is a movie that someone somehow gave the green-light to even without Arnold or James Cameron. The whole John Connor legacy and the Resistance and everything was a significant part of my childhood as was Jurassic Park, and painfully this film ruined just about all of that.
First of all, this isn't really a Terminator movie. It's like a post-apocalyptic war movie but it doesn't have the plot that a terminator is out hunting to kill someone to prevent future events that made up the first two and I guess even the third movie. But even beyond that, this movie sucks. There's Christian Bale playing John Connor, though he must have been under the impression he was playing Batman judging by his 80-year-old Clint Eastwood speaking voice. I am never going to speak words of support for Christian Bale and say he is a better actor than this because, guys, I saw him in Public Enemies. Enough said.
This movie is very forgettable, as are many dumb action movies. But it's never--I repeat: NEVER a good thing when the best part of your movie is seeing Arnold Schwarzenegger's face redone in a CGI. That was kind of a pleasant surprise for me in the theater but I don't know, this movie has nothing else going for it.
Also the guy who plays Kyle Reese is awful. I don't know the actor's name but he also played a very exaggerated Ensign Chekov in the new Star Trek. Far worse here actually.
Another bad thing about this movie is that it thinks the audience is made up of idiots. It sets up this character played by Sam Worthington, the guy from Avatar, who becomes really helpful to have around Christian Bale. But oops!!!!!!!!! It's revealed 2/3 in that he's a machine. Actually no, it was revealed to the audience in the opening fucking scene! Like how stupid do they think we are? They set it up like it's this big mystery even though they did everything in the opening scene but flat-out say he's a machine!
This movie goes for that dark, gritty tone, and just has a very depressing feel to it all-around. The sets are decent at times but the camera-work is nauseating (like another Christian Bale action film that I can think of) and there's never any suspense or anything for the audience to care about. I don't care about the friggin war. I know the humans win. The whole point of the 3 movies was to get John Connor to the war, and the humans would win. But that's the problem with a time-travel series, I guess...
Skip it. You'll thank me later.
42. Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest (2006)
Can I have another dumb sequel to a damn good action movie please? Yep, you probably knew this was coming. The first Pirates of the Caribbean movie was a damn good and refreshing action film. Okay, maybe it's not Raiders of the Lost Ark, but it did a great job of setting up characters that were interesting and that you cared about, thrusting them into fantastical situations, had an excellent performance from Johnny Depp, and did a great job with the sets and the realism of sea travel and battles while mixing it with pirate lore and legend. It's one of my favorite movies still and if there's any complaint I could come up with, it'd be that it's a little long, though admittedly never really dry.
The only thing this movie has in common with its predecessor is that it's too long. Except this time you feel every minute of it. Hell, ever second of it. Every second I spent in the theater watching this was spent thinking about wiser seconds that I could have spent.
This movie tries to outdo its predecessor way too far. For example, let's take the final sword fight scene. The first one offered a great fight between Depp and Geoffrey Rush that was both exciting and visually unique, switching Rush from skeleton to human as he stepped in and out of the light. This one has to get even more fancy because it can't do the same exact thing. So we have three people fighting for a treasure chest. Who's fighting who? Doesn't this guy like this guy? No? I guess not. And a good deal of it is done on a fucking giant wheel as it goes around. Now I know fencing is all about balance but toss anyone on that thing and they'd get their ass run over in a matter of seconds. Nothing feels reel about this movie and I realize the first film wasn't exactly a documentary, but it at least felt real. I mean yeah, it has Keira Knightley getting tossed up 80 feet into the air by pirates holding a trampoline but I don't like mentioning that scene because it reminds me a bit of a typical Disney music number. I guess that makes two complaints with the original movie.
My biggest complaint about this movie other than its boringness and utter stupidity comes in the fact that it is absolutely a TERRIBLE sequel. Why do I say that? Not only does it fail to capture the feel of the original film, but it goes so far as to contradict everything mentioned in the first film. Bootstrap Bill was dead. Nope, he's a member of Davy Jones's crew. Barbossa was dead, you say. Nonsense, he's alive at the end of this movie! But the thing that most bothers me about this movie draws back to the conclusion of the first film. When Sparrow escapes his hanging and gets back to the Black Pearl, Commadore Norrington is left with the opportunity to pursue him. Smiling slightly, he says: "I think we can afford to give Jack Sparrow one day's head start." I thought this was a great way to end this movie. Now it is open to two different perspectives. There's the idiot perspective: Commadore Norrington is extremely stubborn and he has not learned anything in this entire movie. He fully plans on chasing after Sparrow the next day. And there's the correct perspective: He considers chasing Sparrow a mere formality because he has learned in the duration of the film that 1. he isn't that bad of a guy and is actually arguably good and 2. IT'S NOT WORTH IT.
But this film has Norrington in it, of course, and we find through exposition that he lost his ship and was kicked out of the Royal Navy or whatever after desperately pursuing Sparrow in a hurricane. WHAT?! Why? You could see at the end of the movie that he didn't give a shit. Would he really risk the best ship in the Royal Navy to go after one person he wanted to hang? But now apparently he's an alcoholic civilian. Well I guess that explains why he said yes about being in the movie, but come on!
So this movie focuses primarily on the Kraken I guess. Or no, it focuses primarily on Davy Jones and some weird legend with him. Or no, it focuses on saving Bootstrap Bill.....I don't know. All I know is that still nobody trusts Jack Sparrow but the audience and he sacrifices himself to the Kraken at the end of the movie. Did anyone think Sparrow was actually dead? Well if anyone did, Barbossa was resurrected at the end of the movie to say that he's still alive somewhere. Thank God for that.
41. AVP: Alien vs. Predator (2004)
Here we go: the shitfest that ruined two prominent franchises. Don't see these kinds of movies for the plots obviously, they're just excuses to get people to witness aliens fighting predators who are also aliens? Now I've done some research here and I'm not actually certain if there was a single human cast member or not, I've found conflicting viewpoints. The film lists a cast and says that Sanaa Lathan played the lead and was top-billed but from everything else I've looked at, the cast was just a bunch of uninteresting cardboard cutouts.
One problem with this film is that it's PG-13 even though the Alien series and Predator series had previously been nothing but R-rated. Clearly it's just looking for a bigger audience but is thus less enjoyable due to not being as violent as it could have been. Really I don't care because it just sucked that much.
Nothing was suspenseful in this movie. It focused a lot on the human characters even though they all just sucked so much. I knew right away that this was the type of movie that would see one character survive. Do I know that because I've seen Alien? No, I know that because this movie was made in such a sloppy and unsuspenseful way that it's really quite embarrassing.
I'd love to say director Paul W.S. Anderson is above this type of film, but looking at his filmography (Mortal Kombat, Resident Evil, Death Race, The Three Musketeers...) I can't really say that.
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