The Worst Movies Of 2017

With movies like Split, Get Out, and It Comes at Night, 2017 was a pretty solid year for horror. But on the flip side, we also had movies like The Bye Bye Man. Written by Jonathan Penner and directed by Stacey Title, this January fright flick has been described as an "insult to horror fans," an "unbelievably inept movie," and last but not least, "one of the emptiest, nonsensical haunted thrillers ever to fail genre audiences."

Of course, The Bye Bye Man totally deserved the drumming it took from critics. As a movie, it fails on every level imaginable, from the acting to the directing to the laughably bloodless kills. And worst of all for horror fans, the bad guy's mythology doesn't make a lick of sense. What's up with the coins? What's up with the train? What's up with the CGI mess of a hellhound? We never find out, and thankfully, we probably won't get a sequel for any more follow-up.

So yeah, don't think it. Don't say it. And definitely don't watch it. We're probably not the first to make that joke, but it's pretty sound advice nevertheless.

In 2007, author William P. Young published The Shack, a best-selling novel about grief, guilt, and God. Ten years later, it was turned into a movie starring Sam Worthington, Octavia Spencer, and Tim McGraw. You'll never guess which one plays God.

The plot centers around Mack (Worthington), an American dad with an Australian accent who lost his daughter to a serial killer. Years later, he's still struggling, but things take a turn when he gets a letter from the Lord. The Almighty wants Mack to visit the cabin where his daughter was murdered, and once Mack arrives, he's greeted by Jesus (Avraham Aviv Alush), the Holy Spirit (Sumire Matsubara), and God the Father (Spencer), also known as "Papa." The four spend the rest of the movie hashing over Mack's issues, working their way toward forgiveness and happiness, and breezing past the fact that Mack murdered his own dad.

No, seriously. That happens.

If you're looking for deep truths about religion, you might be better served checking out Silence or Cavalry, as The Shack was described by Geoffrey Macnab as "happy-clappy, New-Age-Christian propaganda." Owen Gleiberman summed it up as "a Hallmark-card therapy session," while Peter Bradshaw was offended by the film's "kiddiespeak theology." You won't find any answers to life's big questions here (unless you wanted to know if God is a Neil Young fan), but on the other hand, you will get to see Sam Worthington race Jesus in a supernatural sprint across a lake. So there's that.

Tupac Shakur was one of the most influential artists of his generation, and he definitely deserved a better biopic than All Eyez on Me. Directed by Benny Boom, Eyez explores Shakur's relationship with his drug-addicted mom, his rivalry with the Notorious B.I.G., and his friendship with Jada Pinkett Smith. Well, "explores" might be too nice of a word: the movie glosses over the rapper's career, hitting the highlights instead of really digging into his life. As many, many, many critics have pointed out, the film plays more like a Wikipedia page than an actual movie.

While many critics have given star Demetrius Shipp Jr. credit for playing Tupac, more have slammed the movie's screenplay and editing, with Aisha Harris of Slate describing it as only slightly better than "a direct-to-DVD movie you'd pick up for a couple of bucks from a Wal-Mart bin." However, the biggest criticism is that All Eyez on Me brushes over controversy; most agree the film's handling of Tupac's sexual assault case is irresponsible, if not downright sickening. Here's hoping one day, some future filmmaker makes a Tupac movie that delves a bit deeper.

Diary of a Wimpy Kid: The Long Haul is the fourth entry in a series of miserable kids films, and if you love your children, you'll never let them watch any of these movies ever. The first one, released in 2010, wound up with a measly 53 percent approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes. The second limped away with 47 percent, while part three rebounded with 51. But believe it or not, things get worse with The Long Haul...much, much worse.

Or as film critic Christy Lemire put it, "You'll never know how good the first three Diary of a Wimpy Kid movies were until you're forced to see the fourth one."

Directed by David Bowers, The Long Haul finds the Heffley family on a road trip across America. Theoretically, they're supposed to be heading to their grandmother's house, but Greg (Jason Drucker) and his older brother Rodrick (Charlie Wright) have secret plans to visit a video game convention. And along the way, audiences are bombarded with a never-ending parade of projectile vomit, urine-filled bottles, and more poop jokes than you can dream possible.

True, crude humor can be funny, but as Keith Watson of Slant Magazine wrote, "the fundamental problem with The Long Haul...isn't so much the grossness of its humor as the laziness with which it's executed."

Poor Asa Butterfield. If things had worked out just a little differently, he could've been Spider-Man. Instead, he wound up starring in The Space Between Us, a movie that critic A.A. Dowd described as "the kind of processed-cheese tearjerker, completely devoid of shame, that can harden even the easiest criers into heckling cynics."

This sci-fi rip-off of a John Green novel—The Fault in Our Starman, if you will—starts with a bunch of astronauts on their way to the red planet, but evidently, they skipped all their medical tests because it turns out one of the scientists (Janet Montgomery) is pregnant. She dies giving birth on Mars, and her son Gardner (Butterfield) spends the next 16 years in space. Eventually, he risks coming to Earth in order to find his long-lost dad and meet up with a girl (Britt Robertson) he's been chatting with online; during his journey, the movie desperately tries yanking at your heartstrings, hoping to stir up some kind of emotion other than boredom.

Perhaps the story might've worked better if Butterfield and Robertson made a convincing couple, but the duo lack any spark whatsoever. As a result, we're treated to a second-rate love story, a maudlin version of The Martian that critic Kimber Myers says is "the equivalent of astronaut ice cream, lacking in substance and crumbling to bits at the slightest pressure."

Ever since Iron Man burst onto the scene in 2008, movie studios have desperately been trying to copy the Marvel model. As a result, we've gotten the MonsterVerse, the DC Extended Universe, and now we've got the Dark Universe, an attempt by Universal to cash in on the superhero craze. But instead of relying on talking raccoons or thunder gods, the Dark Universe is all about classic movie monsters a la the Bride of Frankenstein, the Invisible Man, and the Mummy.

Unfortunately for Universal, they bungled the whole franchise right out of the gate. The Mummy bombed at the domestic box office, and the film was savaged by critics. Glenn Kenny found the opening "adventure" scene involving Iraqi insurgents quite tasteless, while Molly Freeman noted the eponymous mummy (Sofia Boutella) was sexualized for no good reason. Many were disappointed with the flat characters, especially considering the stars involved. And if you thought the screenplay was less than original, well, the hosts of Half in the Bag couldn't agree more, as they pointed out how The Mummy lifted element from movies like Lifeforce and An American Werewolf in London.

But worst of all, The Mummy tried to set up a cinematic universe in just two hours, whereas the MCU unfolded over several movies. By trying to lay the framework for a future franchise in just one go, the story suffered, and as a result, The Mummy has set this universe down a rather dark path.

With some movies, you can tell right away that they're going to be awful. But when others bomb, it's a little more surprising. Take The Circle, for example. It's based on a novel by award-winning author Dave Eggers, and it was directed by James Ponsoldt of The Spectacular Now and The End of the Tour. It also featured a who's who of big Hollywood names, including Emma Watson, Tom Hanks, John Boyega, and Patton Oswalt.

Nevertheless, this sci-fi flick failed to live up to its potential. Not only are the characters underdeveloped (critic Katie Walsh describes them as "ciphers and stereotypes, lacking depth or nuance"), but the film doesn't do anything original or interesting with its themes. A creepy internet corporation known as The Circle wants to create a world where privacy is a thing of the past, where cameras are on every corner and all your information is online. Unfortunately, the film hits you right over the head with its message—or as David Sims put it, "It's all like an episode of Black Mirror, if Black Mirror made no effort whatsoever to be subtle."

So while the talent involved is quite impressive, just remember that knowing is good, knowing everything is better, and knowing this film isn't worth your time is best of all.

Perhaps more than any other genre, horror movies are notorious for generating sequel after sequel until audiences forget what made the original film so special in the first place. That's true for Halloween, Nightmare on Elm Street, Paranormal Activity—and now The Ring. Nearly 15 years after the beloved American remake hit theaters in 2002, we've got a new, watered-down version called Rings.

Borrowing the plot from the first film, the movie centers on Julia (Matilda Lutz), a young woman who discovers her boyfriend (Alex Roe) has recently watched the infamous cursed video that every horror fan knows so well. He's running out of time before Samara comes slithering out of the TV, so Julia springs into action, hoping to save his life and stop Samara by finding her remains.

But critics didn't really care all that much about Julia's quest. Evan Saathoff of Birth.Movies.Death. wrote that the movie "becomes something far worse than just bad: boring. And also bad. But so, so boring." He's backed up by A.A. Dowd of The A.V. Club, who said "The real problem with Rings...is that the characters are bland nothings." And Peter Sobczynski of RogerEbert.com slammed the film as "more wearying than frightening."

In other words, Rings commits the greatest sin of any horror movie. It's downright dull.

When Wish Upon hit theaters in July, it faced some steep competition in War for the Planet of the Apes. The Apes sequel walked away with a 93 percent approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes. As for Wish Upon? Let's just say that Broad Green and Orion Pictures probably wish they hadn't invested $12 million into this run-of-the-mill fright flick.

Directed by John R. Leonetti (Annabelle) and written by Barbara Marshall (Viral), Wish Upon follows a high school outcast named Clare (Joey King) who comes into possession of a mysterious box covered in Chinese writing. She quickly discovers the box can grant seven wishes, but unfortunately, the darn thing is possessed by a demon. Sure, the evil spirit will give you your heart's desire, but in exchange, somebody's going to die.

Of course, the obvious way to beat this box is to simply stop wishing, but Clare just can't get enough. She wants to be popular, she wants to date the local hot guy, she wants her dad to start playing the saxophone (what?), and if she's got to pay the "blood price," well, so be it. Tragically, while Clare was busying making her dreams come true—in exchange for friends and family members—theatergoers were stuck with "an unsatisfying combination of Final Destination and The Box," and even worse, they weren't allowed to get their money back, which is a far scarier twist than anything that happens in the film.

Once upon a time, Gerard Butler was the king of Sparta, but with A Family Man, the guy is getting dangerously close to kicking his career into a bottomless pit. Directed by Mark Williams, this paint-by-numbers drama has been described as a "string of manipulative clichés," "run-of-the-mill, and crassly manipulative," and "boring, inoffensive, and mind-numbingly contrived."

The plot follows ruthless businessman Dane Jensen (Gerard Butler), who's all work and no play. This means he ignores his poor children as he tries to win the favor of his about-to-retire employer (Willem Dafoe), outmaneuver his office rival (Alison Brie), and become the new boss, all while drinking a lot of Red Bull. Of course, things get complicated when his kid (Max Jenkins) is diagnosed with leukemia, forcing our hero to choose between his son and his job. Care to guess which one he ends up picking?

Chances are good you can imagine exactly how this movie plays out. According to Victor Stiff of Film School Rejects, it "feels like [the filmmakers] took a stock movie script template and didn't bother filling it in." All in all, A Family Man is a predictable story that tries to jerk a few tears as Gerard Butler becomes a good dad, but since you can see the ending coming a mile away, why not revisit 300 instead?

There's no denying Sean Penn is a talented filmmaker (see Into the Wild for proof), but even the very best directors come up with a bomb now and then. Unfortunately, The Last Face is so bad that when it played at Cannes, the audience started heckling the movie pretty much as soon as it started rolling.

The Last Face takes place in countries like Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Sudan, but for a film set in Africa, it's kind of weird that all the black people are relegated to playing background roles or mutilated corpses. Instead of focusing on, you know, actual Africans, the movie centers on beautiful white people falling in love, and as a result, Claudia Puig of The Wrap says the movie devolves into a "mopey, overlong and vacuous disaster."

Our main character is Wren Petersen (Charlize Theron), the head of a humanitarian organization; while helping victims in war zones, she falls for a surgeon played by Javier Bardem. The two hit it off over a romantic session of brushing teeth, and soon, the movie shifts its focus from the dead and dying to a poorly written love affair. As Christy Lemire of RogerEbert.com put it, "Sean Penn turns African strife into a two-hour perfume commercial...veering between gauzy impressionism and shriek melodrama with his latest directorial effort."

Hollywood has tried to adapt Stephen King's Dark Tower series for years—and now, after years of waiting, fans of the novels can finally see Roland Deschain shoot with his mind and kill with his heart on the big screen. Too bad the movie is absolutely awful.

Directed by Nikolaj Arcel, The Dark Tower stars Idris Elba as Roland, a gunslinger dedicated to protecting the titular tower and defending 11-year-old Jake (Tom Taylor) from the evil Walter, a.k.a. the Man in Black (Matthew McConaughey). Dark Tower should've been a slam dunk (or perhaps a bulls-eye?), but critics such as Ty Burr of The Boston Globe says the film feels "derivative, even generic." And while most everyone agrees that Elba is the best thing about the movie, his talents go to waste in a horribly written role. (Just to be clear, we're talking about the screenplay here, not the books.)

Most critics also say that McConaughey was totally miscast, with Alison Willmore of Buzzfeed writing that he "offers up what's basically a more evil version of whatever he's doing in those Lincoln car commercials," but ultimately, most agree the movie lacks that certain something that makes fantasy films like Lord of the Rings feel special. In addition to critiquing the "wonky special effects" and "highly-questionable CGI," Scott Wampler of Birth.Movies.Death. says The Dark Tower's "biggest problem is how lifeless it all feels, how weak and lame the final product is."

Seriously, if you can't make a movie about otherworldly gunfighters and psycho sorcerers interesting, then you've truly forgotten the face of your father.

When the trailer for Geostorm first hit, everybody knew we were in for something stupid, but audiences had their fingers crossed for some campy fun. Unfortunately, according to critics like John DeFore of The Hollywood Reporter, Geostorm is just "big, dumb, and boring," the worst sin for any big budget disaster flick.

Directed by Dean Devlin, Geostorm takes place in a future where scientist Jake Lawson (Gerard Butler) has created the "Dutch Boy," a series of satellites that protects the world from apocalyptic weather events. But when somebody sabotages the system, Lawson and friends have to put their heads together to save Earth from hail, tornadoes, and the biggest storm in human history.

Sure, we've got explosions destroying Hong Kong, Orlando being attacked by crazy lightning bolts, and a bikini-clad girl trying to outrun a deadly cold front. But the action scenes are few and far between, interrupted by long segments of boring, flat characters staring at a bunch of screens. As Mike D'Angelo of The A.V. Club put it, "15 minutes worth of impressive annihilation won't be worth enduring an hour and a half of dramatic monotony."

Worst of all, we don't even get to see a geostorm. Thanks for that deceptive title, Dean Devlin.

Theoretically, Bright sounds like it should be pretty awesome. A cop movie set in an alternate universe where orcs and humans live side by side? Yeah, it sounds goofy, but it sounds like the right kind of goofy. However, when you actually log into your Netflix account and watch this Will Smith vehicle, you're reminded that theory and actual practice are often two very different things.

Directed by David Ayer and written by Max Landis, Bright follows a human cop (Smith) and the world's first orc officer (Joel Edgerton) as they try to protect an elf and her magic wand from pretty much every evil creature in Los Angeles. But while there's a rich mythology here to explore, the world of Bright feels incredibly two-dimensional. "Los Angeles is almost identical to how it is in real life," wrote David Ehrlich of IndieWire, "except that elves are the one percent and orcs are the systematically oppressed underclass. The film's lazy refusal to explore its conceit any deeper than that is truly staggering...."

In addition to a world that isn't fleshed out to its true potential, the action scenes lack the gritty pop of a movie like Training Day, and while Edgerton tries to salvage the film with the best performance he can muster under all that makeup, the script isn't doing him any favors. Plus, whenever Smith drops a line like, "Fairy lives don't matter," well, then it's probably time to press pause and revisit...pretty much anything else on Netflix.

Read the reviews for Fist Fight, and you'll find a lot of adjectives like "ugly," "mean-spirited," and "hyper-aggressive," which isn't meant as a compliment. You'll also find that pretty much everyone who sat through this hour and half improv session came away with the exact same conclusion: Fist Fight isn't funny. And that's a big problem when your movie is supposed to be a comedy.

The premise follows a mild-mannered English teacher named Andy (Charlie Day) who witnesses a crazed history teacher named Ron (Ice Cube) intimidate a student with an axe. Naturally, Andy rats out Ron to the principal, but that doesn't sit well with alpha male Ron, who challenges Andy to a fist fight. The rest of the film follows our hero as he tries to escape the upcoming showdown.

It seems like there's some comic potential here, but Fist Fight just misses with every single shot. Robert Abele of The Wrap said it was "ineptly assembled, shoddy-looking and devoid of comic tension or creative lunacy." And Richard Roeper said the film was "so bereft of laughs, I found myself rooting for a technical malfunction if only to catch a momentary breather." With its hostile humor and unlikable characters, Fist Fight feels like exactly that—a movie that won't stop punching you in the face.

Want to watch a movie where Terry Bradshaw makes pornographic jokes about Glenn Close? Or a movie where Owen Wilson urinates on a kid? If the answer is no, then you should probably pass on Father Figures, a film that critic Nick Allen described as "the latest textbook in how to make a lazy Hollywood comedy."

Directed by Lawrence Sher, the plot follows twin brothers—played by Wilson and Ed Helms—as they travel across America, searching for their long lost dad. Up until recently, they believed their old man had passed away, but after their mom (Close) reveals he's still alive somewhere, they set off to find him. Problem is, their mother was a party animal in the '70s, so their dad could be Bradshaw, Ving Rhames, or J.K. Simmons—an Oscar winner reduced to playing in a sad excuse for a comedy.

As Helms and Wilson journey across the U.S., the movie drops some racist humor, an incest joke, and two oversized cat testicles. It's all meant for laughs, but this is the wrong kind of raunchy, made even worse when the film inexplicably tries to switch from bawdy to heartwarming, prompting critic Katie Walsh to describe Father Figures as "a nearly two-hour borderline hostage situation, with torture involving bad, offensive and unfunny 'comedy.'"

There are two kinds of Bruce Willis movies: the kind where he actually cares about what he's doing and the kind where he just wants a paycheck. Once Upon a Time in Venice definitely falls in the latter category. Directed by Mark Cullen and co-written with his brother Robb (the screenwriters behind another epically awful Willis flick, Cop Out), Venice finds the veteran actor playing a private eye trying to rescue his dog from a kingpin named Spyder (Jason Momoa).

While the plot sounds kind of quirky, it doesn't live up to its goofball premise, with The A.V. Club's Ignatiy Vishnevetsky describing the film as "a tiresome imitation of smart-alecky Shane Black whodunits like Kiss Kiss Bang Bang and The Last Boy Scout." In addition to the lousy screenplay, the movie is riddled with offensive jokes aimed at minority groups like Latinos, cross-dressers, and Jewish landlords. And then, of course, there's Willis, who doesn't seem to care about anything that's happening around him. Robert Abele of The Wrap pointed out that "In any given scene, Willis flirts with looking bored, distracted, or unsure whether he's supposed to be funny or tough," and Craig D. Lindsey of LA Weekly wrote that Willis is "a sterling example of how a lazy star can make a bad movie even worse."

So yeah, you should probably just re-watch Die Hard or Pulp Fiction instead.

Based on the 2000 novel, Tulip Fever had a long and troubled production before finally hitting theaters in 2017. And even though it starred three Oscar-winning actors in Alicia Vikander, Judi Dench, and Christoph Waltz, the movie never truly blossomed. Set in 1630s Amsterdam, the plot follows a young woman (Vikander) married to a much older misogynist (Waltz), and much to his disappointment, she's unable to give birth.

This was a pretty terrible situation for a woman in the 17th century, but after falling head over heels for a young painter (Dane DeHaan), she begins cooking up a plan to escape, one that involves pillows, fake pregnancies, and insanely expensive tulips. However, while this might work in the book, it fails big time on the big screen.

Leah Greenblatt of Entertainment Weekly wrote the film "never quite transcends the feeling of watching a Dutch masterpiece done in paint-by-number," and Nick Allen of Rogerebert.com said the movie "drags you one way, and then another, and often clumsily bridges over missing narrative beats with goofy ADR or making you catch up." If you're dying to find to what happens in the story, visit your local library and check out Deborah Moggach's novel instead.