It's The Most Wonderful Time Of The Year... "The Turkeys of the Year: 2017"

The Turkey of the Year Awards: 2017 Edition

As I sit down to prepare to look back at the movies I've reviewed since last Thanksgiving which I absolutely disliked, I am pleased that only 21 movies received low enough marks (D+ to F-) to be in the running for Turkey of the Year!

Now this list is going to contain some movies that were both popular and critically acclaimed and in some cases garnered (or still might garner) award recoc

However for me, they did absolutely nothing.

I found myself bored with most of the films on this year's list.

For me, that's the biggest crime a piece of entertainment can be, and that's boring.

Naturally, your mileage may vary! :)

As usual, I'll try and stick to the "big name, big budget " films and ignore some of the lesser known, but still just as awful films from this last year.

Meet The Blacks, I'm looking at you. Though to be fair, they did like and retweeted (twice!) my review of the film. : )

Let the games begin!

X-Men: Apocalypse -

Only the strong will survive. That's a great tag line for a film. Little did I know, they meant that was for the audience to endure the latest film in the X-Men franchise. To be quite honest, I'm not one that is passionately yearning for Marvel to regain the rights to the X-Men. Until they began the reboot with First Class, it's really a franchise that I only mildly enjoyed in the first place. Everything they had worked for since that time apparently culminated with Days of Future Past. This returned the muddled cast of thousands that I was quite frankly, bored with from start to finish. Remove the Quicksilver scene, and I have no memory of anything that really happened in this film.

Speaking of X-Men...

 Logan - 

Yep, I am a hater of the critical darling, Logan. Yay! We have an R rating! Let's drop F-bombs and buckets of blood. And let's usher Hugh Jackman off after nearly 2 decades of running around as Wolverine. I know many people loved this one, and have clamored for it to win awards and nominations for Jackman and Stewart. I am not one of those clamoring. If I had to go back and watch any Logan solo outing, I'd pick any of them again before I watched this one.

Yes, even X-Men Origins: Wolverine.

:)

Legend of Tarzan -

It looked visually stunning, but everyone was bored and lost interest with it within the first 20 to 30 minutes, though it felt like we had been watching it for over an hour at that point. I don't know, is it the character? I'm not sure that Tarzan has ever had a decent film made about him yet.

This was no exception.

Hardcore Henry -

I'm not sure if I'm not a fan of 1st person shooter movies, or if I'm not a fan of movies where there is no main character with which the audience can truly sympathize/empathize as you watch them go through the paces. Either way, this was a failed experiment in my eyes. Plus an ending that's telegraphed at the beginning, it just adds up to one big "Game Over".

Manchester By The Sea - 

I told you there would be critical darlings and award winners on the list. This sums up both in one package. I think I let this one play for nearly an hour, and just realized that I really didn't want to spend another minute with Casey Affleck's character. I don't care what kind of emotional roller coaster he's been on. That said, I'm very happy that Amazon and Netflix (and other) studios are getting things made that are being reviewed very well and earning award nominations. So there is that silver lining for this dreary cloud.

Assassins Creed - 

Clearly video game adaptations are placed under intense scrutiny around here. Long, convoluted, and again, boring. The set pieces set in the past looked amazing, but I frankly didn't care about anyone or anything I was watching. Not sure what the actual length of this movie was, but it felt like it dragged on for hours, and that's another cardinal sin for an action movie. Long AND boring? The double kiss of death.

A Monster Calls - 

For proof that I'm a heartless monster, I give you this tale about a monster who comes to visit a boy during the most traumatic time in his life to tell him stories. Meanwhile his mom is dying of cancer. By the middle of the first story within the story, I was dying of boredom and clicked it off.

Beauty and the Beast -

How dare I!?!

All this movie did was make me cringe often, and yearn to be watching the far superior animated version. I've given Disney a pass on their live action remakes before, usually for being bland and not offering anything better than what they have already given us in animated form. This, however, was more than I was willing to forgive. I suppose it starts with the lead, Emma Watson, who reminds me of the woefully miscast Kristen Stewart as Snow White, the fairest of them all in the Huntsman films. I know, it's shameful to judge a book by its cover or an actress by her looks, but when the line of the song states "it's no wonder that her name means Beauty..." eh... not feeling it. Or when her acting skills in a poignant moment raise an eyebrow or a chuckle instead of sympathy... yeah... you're doing it wrong.

Sausage Party - 

Did it get funnier after the first 20 minutes? Because that's really all I bothered with, then walked away. These movies often remind me of the "just because you can doesn't mean you should" axiom. Add to that the negative press of the animators not getting paid/credit for their effort, and that just added insult to injury on this one.

Snatched - 

I think I've made it abundantly clear that I'm never going to buy into the Amy Schurmer experiment. She's better in support of a movie than in trying to carry it. I've tried, but I don't get her appeal. Then the dreadful misuse of Goldie Hawn, and really the entire supporting cast of this film, that was just disappointment from the word go on this one.


And that's it.

A special shout-out to Johnny Depp for NOT being on this list for the first time in a long time!

We'll see if 2018 is as kind, I do have a Pirates of the Caribbean movie review on the horizon.. ;)

Time to reset the clock to zero and begin looking for next year's turkeys, and as always, hoping I honestly don't find any.

Happy Thanksgiving Everyone!!

And The Award For Most Overrated Superhero Film Of 2017...."Logan"

Logan (2017)

Rated R

Starring Hugh Jackman, Patrick Stewart, Dafne Keen, Stephen Merchant, Boyd Holbrook

Written and Directed by James Mangold

The Story:

In the future, all of the X-Men are dead, except Logan (Jackman) who now cares for an ailing Professor X (Stewart). With no new mutants to train, and Xavier's mind slowly slipping away making him a danger to himself and the world, Logan is trying to get them away from humanity once and for all. Complicating matters, a little girl named Laura (Keen) who was mutated in a lab to be just like Logan, only smaller and much cuter.

Oh, and pretty much everyone dies by the end.

How's that for a big #@$#$ing spoiler?

Well there's your second hint, the first was the title of this @#$@#!$@ing review in the first place.

Thanks to the success of Deadpool, everyone decided that the finale to Hugh Jackman's take as Wolverine would also be rated R.

Why?

So they could show him sticking his claws in people's faces, cutting them to ribbons.

And saying %$&^

A lot.

Apparently $#@#$ you Mother#$#@#@$ is script shorthand for lazy R rated movies.

I get it.

I've climbed up on this soapbox so many times, usually for the R rated comedy raunchfests.

I chastise those for lazy writing, because anyone can F*&$#@#ing cuss, ooooh, how edgy, but if you're going to do it with jokes, the jokes themselves need to be funny, sans language.

So too, in this edgy mutant action-thriller-drama, so too must everything be interesting and not just a way to keep a generation of fans away from the final installment because, well, @#$# you!

Unlike Deadpool, who had only once been seen in a movie form before, and frankly, it sucked, Wolverine has been with us for what, 27 or so movies at this point. Every X-Men movie, and several of his own films. All rated PG-13.

17 years Jackman has been doing this, and he is still the best there is at what he does.

No, I'm putting the blame squarely on the feet of the #@$@#ing lazy screenwriters who frankly bored me with their overuse of language in an otherwise pedestrian script.

You want a good X-Men/Wolverine movie, go see First Class or Days of Future Past. Some might even say X2, but I haven't seen that in so long, I couldn't tell you for certain anymore.

Nope, at the end of the day, I have to grade this final version of Logan against the likes of Batman vs. Superman, and say that when I go to watch a superhero movie, I go to be excited and entertained.

This didn't do it for me, and frankly, if I were to want to watch a Logan solo adventure, I'd rather rewatch X-Men Origins: Wolverine.

Yeah, it's got it's issues (oh boy, does it have issues) but it was depressing because of how it was executed.

This version of Logan set out to be depressing from the word go, and succeeded all around.

Therefore, I can't give a seal of approval to a movie that knowingly turns its back on the millions of kids who grew up on Jackman as Wolverine just to make an edgy, adult thriller that kills him off at the end.

#@$@# that.

Final Grade: C..maybe C-...no, I'll have to go D+