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Underrated: Alfie; De-Lovely; The Final Cut; Hidalgo; The Ladykillers; Spanglish
Disappointments: Beyond the Sea; The Passion of the Christ; The Polar Express; She Hate Me; The Stepford Wives; The Terminal
THE 10 WORST
1. CHRISTMAS WITH THE KRANKS This reprehensible motion picture -- the worst holiday film ever made -- is the ultimate Red State movie: A Christmas flick that hypocritically refuses to mention Jesus or any other aspect of Christianity (celebrating the holiday's commercialism instead), and whose "heroes" are obnoxious, intrusive suburbanites who insist that the Kranks (Tim Allen and Jamie Lee Curtis) conform to their narrow-minded way of thinking... or else. Is it any surprise that the nation's evangelists have been boasting in the media about how they're urging their constituents to see this film?
2. THE WHOLE TEN YARDS After a two-year hiatus, Bruce Willis returns to my 10 Worst list with a ghastly sequel to a so-so movie that few even remember (The Whole Nine Yards). The low point in 2004 screen comedy: Hungover Willis and hapless Matthew Perry waking up naked in the same bed, at which point Perry mutters, "Why does my ass hurt?"
3. TWISTED It's shaping up to be a lousy century for straight genre thrillers, but even two other clunkers from this past spring, Angelina Jolie's Taking Lives and Johnny Depp's Secret Window, weren't quite as abysmal as this howler in which an imbecilic detective (Ashley Judd) becomes the leading suspect in her own murder investigation. It's almost impossible to wrap one's mind around the fact that this was directed by Philip Kaufman (The Right Stuff, The Unbearable Lightness of Being).
4. ALEXANDER The anti-Troy, and the nadir in Oliver Stone's otherwise strong career -- has any other movie released during the past 12 months been this relentlessly boring? Stone's cinematic instincts abandoned him completely on this project, resulting in a costly turkey that fails on just about every conceivable level.
5. VAN HELSING As a lifelong lover of Universal's classic monster movies, no other picture this year offended my Inner Film Geek as much as this blasphemous bomb in which the title hero (Hugh Jackman, drained of all charisma) takes on the Frankenstein monster, a CGI werewolf and Dracula (Richard Roxburgh, the worst Count ever). The text of Bram Stoker and Mary Shelley is treated as nothing more than toilet paper in the outhouse of writer-director Stephen Sommers' imagination, soiled and shredded beyond all recognition.
6. ENVY A schmuck becomes jealous after his best friend invents the Vapoorizer, a spray that magically makes dog doo disappear into thin air. Director Barry Levinson's resume includes such nyuk-filled efforts as Diner and Good Morning, Vietnam, while Ben Stiller and Jack Black are both accomplished comedians. But it's impossible to deliver any laughs when the script is complete, uh, dog doo.
7. GARFIELD: THE MOVIE At least it's not Family Circus: The Motion Picture. Otherwise, there's nothing positive to say about this atrocious comic strip adaptation that will feel like a slow crawl through broken glass for anyone old enough to have mastered the fine art of shoelace-tying. Bill Murray (providing the voice of the computer-generated Garfield) followed Lost In Translation with this!?
8. SOUL PLANE Whiter-than-white Tom Arnold plays a nerd whose name is pronounced "Elvis Honky," while John Witherspoon is cast as a blind man who thinks he's pleasuring a lady when he's actually grinding his fingers into her baked potato. In other words, a clever concept that might have worked as an airborne Barbershop is instead squandered for the sake of one desperate gag after another.
9. THUNDERBIRDS Let's see: The clean-cut heroes seem almost Aryan by design, the main villain (slumming Ben Kingsley) is a dark-skinned foreigner, his right-hand man is a murderous Anglo-African thug constantly lusting after white women, and their accomplice is a brainy lady whose homeliness is meant to suggest that she deserves neither love nor respect. But maybe I'm reading too much into a TV-show knockoff that, by every other indication, contains the depth of a petri dish that's already filled to the rim.
10. CATWOMAN Halle Berry and Sharon Stone scratch and claw their way through the "best" bad movie of the year -- insofar as it's the only one on this list that's actually fun to watch. It just doesn't understand how rancid it truly is, and therein lies the appeal, allowing it to bask in the sort of affectionate derision that helped turn Ed Wood flicks into camp classics. Think we can coax Joel, Crow and Tom Servo out of retirement to take a crack at this one?