Seven Worst Films of 2013

A couple of days ago, I gave you all the information you’d been waiting on the edges of your seats for: my favourite films of 2013. Well, here’s another list for you! One of the pitfalls of going to see 45 films a year is that it’s quite likely you’ll end up seeing some real stinkers. Here are the seven which I felt were the poorest of those I watched in 2013.

7. The Place Beyond The Pines
Ryan Gosling (who I generally like) has the dishonour of featuring three times on this list, although this one had little to do with him. The first hour or so of this film was enjoyable, but it then stopped focusing on Gosling’s character and followed Bradley Cooper instead. This took the film in an unexpected direction, which can sometimes be good, but in this instance was not. Thereafter, the film felt very poorly organised and the focus and narrative seemed to make little sense.

6. Olympus Has Fallen
I wasn’t expecting this to be good, and I can’t now recall what prompted me to see it. I think it was simply having a Saturday afternoon free, and an Unlimited card burning a hole in my pocket (I certainly wouldn’t have paid specifically to see this film). It was pretty much what I was expecting: a poor man’s Die Hard, starring the hit-and-miss Gerard Butler instead of the hit-followed-by-hit-followed-by-hit Bruce Willis, with dialogue that could have been written by a 12-year-old, and a hefty helping of blind American patriotism. Minimal plot, plenty of guns and explosions, little explanation as to why much of what happened, happened. (I did quite like the opening scenes with Preisdent Aaron Eckhart and his son, though). When White House Down was released a few months later, which appeared to be more or less the same film, I opted not to bother with it.

5. Gangster Squad
Another swing and a miss from Gosling, although again he shares the screen as part of an ensemble including Josh Brolin, Sean Penn and Emma Stone. I really expected to enjoy this one, as it featured a number of actors I like (see non-exhaustive list above), but there was a lot more style to it than substance. A decent enough plot was poorly executed, or so I felt, by the script. It picked up a bit during the last half-hour or so, and some of it was quite clever, but overall I was left fairly dissatisfied.

4. Man Of Steel
Oh dear. Oh dear, oh dear. I was rather expecting this to be a disaster, although I was disappointed to be proved right. This film was released on my birthday, but I opted to defer watching it for a while, which proved sensible. On paper, this should have worked; Christopher Nolan and David S. Goyer were both integral to the most recent three Batman films, which I and millions of others loved. Their involvement in rebooting Superman was exciting, but there was too much of a similarity. Batman and Superman are fundamentally different characters; the former is a flawed human who takes up the mantle of a city protector, while the latter is an extra-terrestrial with incredible powers. There is plenty of scope for making the Batman franchise darker, and this worked well with Nolan’s trilogy. It was also brilliantly done in the recent Spider-Man reboot, but much less so in Man Of Steel. The unknown Henry Cavill could have gone either way in the lead role, but I thought he was fairly bland and failed to really engage with his character. Overall, I felt the tone didn’t really fit Superman, and some parts of the story made no sense (his dad’s death, for instance, was totally bizarre). The first hour or so of the film was okay, but mainly because I was expecting it to get going soon, which it never really did. The subsequent four hours (a slight exaggeration) were rather intolerable. The original John Williams score would have been a welcome addition, although Williams might have been insulted if they’d associated his work with this film, and it certainly wouldn’t have saved the film. If ever a franchise needed Ben Affleck to save it, this is surely it.

3. Spring Breakers
I’m not really sure what to say about this one. It was just very, very bad. More than half the people at the screening I attended left long before the film was over, and, even though there were only about 20 people there in the first place, that tells you something about the quality of the film. If I could go back and not watch it, I would; I just felt as though my time had been wasted.

2. I Give It A Year
I had expected this one to be bad, but I wasn’t quite prepared for the level to which it sank. Again, I can’t remember why I saw it, and probably wouldn’t have if I’d been paying for it. From the trailer, I was anticipating a trashy comedy that’s easy to watch and decent enough entertainment, with a couple of decent laughs but immediately forgettable. I don’t think I laughed once, though, and found nothing engaging about the characters or story (a couple gets married after knowing each other for a short time; nobody expects it to work out, and it doesn’t). Likeable characters are not essential for me to enjoy something (see Costanza, George and Philadelphia, It’s Always Sunny In), but there needs to be something relatable or in some way interesting, which was definitely missing. I don’t go in for basic mindless entertainment very often, but when I do I usually get what I was expecting and don’t complain about what I saw. This time I am, because there was even less substance than there really should be to even a short story written by an illiterate child with the imagination of a thing with almost no imagination.

1. Only God Forgives
Controversial, perhaps, but Ry-Gos (I’m calling him that, even if nobody else is, so just deal with it) finds himself at both ends of this list. I hated this film, and it’s not because I didn’t ‘get’ it. In fact, I don’t believe anybody ‘got’ it; I don’t think there’s anything to ‘get,’ and a lot of people were too afraid to say they didn’t ‘get’ it, so they claimed they ‘got’ it. Now they’re all (presumably) sitting round a table, in an emperor’s new clothes-style stand-off, waiting to see who blinks first. There isn’t enough of a plot to justify its (admittedly fairly short) running time, as only about half of a story is told. It’s told out of order, for no clear reason other than to confuse people, and much of it is unexplained, incomprehensible gibberish. If I’d stayed in my flat and read the plot summary on Wikipedia (as I did afterwards) I’d have understood the film better (as I did afterwards), but not wasted two hours of my life (as I did not). I don’t need everything spelled out for me to enjoy a film, but there’s a massive difference between filling in the blanks at the ending of Inception, and having to make up half the story yourself in order for it to make any sense. Sometimes complex, deep, clever art films are not complex, deep or clever; they’re just shite, and this is one of them.
Dishonourable mention must go to World War Z, which I only saw because some of it (far less than I’d been led to believe) was filmed in Glasgow. I’d heard it was terrible, although I found it much less so than I’d anticipated, which may have been enough to keep it off the list. Stand Up Guys, starring Al Pacino, Christopher Walken and Alan Arkin as ex-Mafia men, also gets a reprieve on the basis that, despite being an awful film, it was quite often funny how bad it was. I got the impression that the three stars knew how terrible it was, but they enjoyed doing it and felt there was some merit in making something bad. Sort of like The Room, but also nothing like The Room. Plus, it was better than Plan 9 From Outer Space, so it couldn’t have been that bad.