THE WORST FILMS OF 2013

Bad movies are like bullies: You know in your heart you should just forget them, turning the other cheek rather than holding a grudge, but the thirst for retribution can be consuming. Here, ranked by rankness, are the year’s worst movies—a hall of shame that includes blockbusters, sequels, spinoffs, franchise hopefuls and laughless comedies. (Bad movies, after all, come in all shapes, sizes, and budgets.) Don’t have the stomach for such petty score settling?

Planes

Though often derided as the lone lemon on the Pixar lot, Cars 2 looks like Toy Story 2 compared to the parent company’s insultingly lazy attempt at a spinoff. Set in the same confusing, nonsensical universe as the Cars movies, Disney’s Planes swipes shamelessly from the first film in that series, setting up its crop-duster hero (voiced by Dane Cook, doing his best Owen Wilson) with a wise old mentor figure and a yokel sidekick. In place of characters, the movie offers only broad, borderline-offensive caricatures, like the dopey Mexican plane who sings a slow mariachi cover of “Love Machine.” Planes feels like a soulless, synthetic approximation of the Pixar touch. More bad news for parents and film critics alike: There’s already a sequel in the works, due in summer 2014. Will Planes 3 make Planes look like WALL-E?

Battle Of The Year

Battle Of The Year is less a movie than a feature-length advertisement for director Benson Lee’s previous film, Planet B-Boy, interspersed with clunky, almost absurd product placement and choppy dance sequences that make one long for the smooth texture of a shave with the new Braun electric razor. Rife with stilted acting and underdog sports clichés, the movie is distinguished only by dialogue so awful (“I went to a concert, and I overheard some high-school kids saying that B-boying is no longer cool!”) that bad movie buffs will want to use their revolutionary new Sony Xperia tablets to hear it again and again. It’s probably a bad sign when a large chunk of a movie consists of the characters watching a different, better film about the exact same subject: Planet B-Boy, directed by Benson Lee and currently available on Netflix Instant!

Dario Argento’s Dracula

The once-great Italian horror maestro Dario Argento hits a new low with this retelling of the Dracula myth, to which he remains largely faithful—save for that moment when the count transforms into a gigantic preying mantis. If that sounds batshit insane, it’s in keeping with the general ludicrousness of this entire endeavor. The film is defined by incessant cheesiness; uniformly amateurish acting; cornball, stuff-flying-at-the-screen 3D; and gratuitous T&A—the last of which appears so early on in Dracula, it’s as if Argento is determined to forewarn viewers that his latest is nothing but direct-to-video-grade junk.

The Big Wedding

Are you a baby boomer who enjoys third-rate sex farces, late-period Robert De Niro, pseudo-incestuous overtones, and being pandered to? Does the idea of Robin Williams yukking it up as a Catholic priest appeal to you? Do you find stereotypical depictions of Latin Americans hilarious? Are you okay with the fact that, instead of casting an actual Latino, the production chose to spray-tan Ben Barnes, whose previous roles include Dorian Gray and Prince Caspian of Narnia, and who is so quintessentially pale and British that he was once in the running to represent the U.K. at Eurovision? Are you deaf, and therefore will you not notice the amateurish sound design, or the fact that half of De Niro’s lines were poorly dubbed? If you answered “yes” to any or all of those questions, boy do we have a movie for you.

Gangster Squad

Handed a budget somewhere in the $60-million range, director Ruben Fleischer (Zombieland, 30 Minutes Or Less) turned out a star-studded, “prestige” gangster picture with all the depth and soul of a Vanity Fair spread. The cast—Sean Penn, Josh Brolin, Ryan Gosling, Emma Stone, Giovanni Ribisi, Anthony Mackie, Nick Nolte, etc.—stand around posing in tailored outfits trying not to look embarrassed by all the goofy period phrases they’re forced to utter (“scram,” “ducky,” “who’s the tomato?”). This is the sort of movie in which a plucky shoeshine boy gets introduced solely so he can be struck by a stray bullet later on. (Gosling actually has to cradle the kid’s body and bellow “Noooo!”) The only notable thing about Gangster Squad is how repellently violent it is—for a supposedly adult period pic, it’s bizarrely packed with slick, weightless maimings and beatings. You could write the movie off as just another crappy period pic, but in an era when the major studios finance maybe one adult drama per year, it represents a colossal, shameful waste of money and talent.

Man Of Steel

One of the most hilariously pretentious scenes in Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight Rises was the football stadium apocalypse, which was scored to a boy soprano singing “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Zack Snyder’s Man Of Steel sustains that same level of pomposity over 143 interminable minutes. Snyder wants viewers to ponder Superman as a moral being, but someone really needs to tell him (and Nolan) that superheroes—impossibly powerful, infallibly good—are maybe the least appropriate vehicles imaginable for moral inquiry. Why, for instance, are we supposed to care that (SPOILER ALERT) Superman kills Zod at the end when he has spent the previous 40 minutes completely demolishing Metropolis, presumably killing a good portion of its inhabitants? And what are we supposed to think when Supes has his first big romantic clinch with Lois standing amid the debris? With this single movie, the trend toward “serious” superhero stories officially achieves entropy. Also: Has a big blockbuster ever contained more cynical, blatant product placement?

A Good Day To Die Hard

Twenty-five years after he first donned the badge and white tank top, Bruce Willis has finally done what countless terrorists with exaggerated accents could not: He’s killed John McClane. Not literally, of course, as that would require Hollywood to retire a character who still puts asses in seats. But this McClane, a bored-looking brute on a mission to Moscow, bears no resemblance to the one Willis played in Die Hard. Gone is the cowboy charisma, taking with it any traces of fear and vulnerability; where Willis once made audiences feel every shard of glass he stepped on, his wisecracking lawman now shrugs off a vertical plummet through several skylights. He’s an impostor, and so too is this numbing fourth sequel, the year’s most depressing exploitation of a once-healthy franchise. Nothing works here—not the action, which is incoherent, nor the villains, who are forgettable, nor the plot, which is somehow both needlessly complicated and completely negligible. Despite being set in one of the world’s most iconic cities, A Good Day To Die Hard includes few recognizable landmarks in its demolition derby; McClane could be speeding around any urban locale, gunning down faceless baddies of any nationality. Joyless, soulless, and witless, it’s a film that deserves to be tossed from the top floor of the Nakatomi Plaza. As for talk that Willis may reprise the drained-dry role for yet another installment: Yippee ki-nay, motherfucker.