Worst Films of 2015 | The Source Weekly - Bend

Worst Films of 2015

I tend to avoid films that look like they're going to be terrible, but that isn't always possible. Sometimes high expectations can take a movie that is only serviceable and make it utter garbage because of how great the marketing is. While these are certainly not the five worst movies of 2015, they are most definitely my five biggest disappointments based solely on my purely subjective excitement level going into them.

5) The Transporter: Refueled

Objectively, this was the worst movie I sat through in a theater this year, since it was the only one that seriously challenged my journalistic integrity by almost sending me fleeing long before the final credits rolled. Since I will never write a review of a movie I haven't finished, I stayed and hated almost every second of this dull, sexist hunk of trash. I have never longed for Jason Statham more in my life than while watching the charisma-challenged Ed Skrein flail about attempting to be badass.

4) The Gallows

I have an admission to make. I still like the found footage horror genre. While most of it is genuinely terrible (this movie), sometimes the conceit can make for a fun and memorable tale (Willow Creek, The Visit). However, The Gallows seems like a horror flick that had a location (a high school after hours) it could use cheaply, so they wrote a movie to fill it. A murderous ghost wreaking havoc in the theater department of a high school should have been right in my wheelhouse, but since so much of the film was blurry shots of people's shoes while running, I'm still not really sure what happened.

3) Jupiter Ascending

I love The Wachowskis and I love Channing Tatum. I especially love big dumb space operas along the lines of The Fifth Element and the Culture series of books by Iain Banks. But Jupiter Ascending is so relentlessly dumb, and Tatum and Mila Kunis are so hopelessly miscast, that the movie just comes across as a boring misfire with some beautiful visuals. The only person having any fun here is Eddie Redmayne and I'm not sure what he's doing can remotely be called "good." After Cloud Atlas and the wonderful Sense8 Netflix series, I had high hopestThe Wachowskis would give me some good brain food, but this is a spectacular miss.

2) Entourage

One winter when I was extra cold and depressed, my nextdoor neighbor rented every episode of Entourage and loaned them to me...one disc at a time. I used to not want to watch the show because it was the life I wanted to lead and I was jealous, but now I'm glad I saw it because that life looks toxic, destructive, and untenable. The show kept getting worse each season, so I knew the movie wouldn't be great, but I had to see it. I had to know how it all ends. It doesn't. There's no movie here, just an episode of the show four times longer than normal. Everyone is the worst and this movie might just make you hate the human race a little bit more.

1) Spectre

Obviously, Sam Mendes is an excellent filmmaker and there are plenty of things about the film that were done well, but this was the most inert and boring movie I've seen all year. Bond goes rogue again (one film after coming back from being rogue) and goes on an adventure that is almost a complete retelling of Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation from earlier this year. Spectre manages to have a dull car chase, a completely anti-climactic ending, and it wastes Christoph Waltz in what should have been a knockout role for him. Barely any of this movie worked and, again, while I'm sure it can't be the worst movie of the year, it was my biggest disappointment of 2015.