2013 Year in Review - Films 76-100

Over the next few posts, I'll rank every film that was released in theaters in 2013 and that I saw. In total, this was 100 movies. Some of them were great, some were awful and a bunch were mediocre. I'll highlight some films that stuck with me.

In this post we tackle the bottom quarter and it's pretty awful.

Terrible Movies

100. The Lone Ranger
99. Movie 43
98. This Is The End
97. Grown Ups 2
96. 47 Ronin
95. Oldboy
94. Hours
93. Olympus Has Fallen
92. The Bling Ring
91. The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones

It is fairly easy to peg all of these movies as awful. Movie 43 somehow blackmailed very many, very good actors into an awful parody? Satire? It certainly wasn't very funny. Hours was a tedious waiting game with Paul Walker sitting beside a cradle. The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones managed to butcher a not awful but certainly not good book while being adapted to the screen. All these fail to hold a match to just how awful The Lone Ranger was. There was a lot of possibility and even glimpses of a better plot and yet it really does feel as if the cut up two movies and smashed them together like a child who's not quite ready to try a jigsaw puzzle. Perhaps they'll find a way to release a better cut for home release one day. So for that, The Lone Ranger gets the coveted #100 spot.

Not My Cup of Tea

90. Blackfish
89. Upstream Color
88. Escape from Tomorrow

There's nothing inherently wrong with these movies, they just don't fit well in my expected grading scale. So they end up here, towards the bottom of my list. It's far more apt to strike them from the rankings completely but that would leave me at an awkward 97 movies. Blackfish feels a bit too one-sided, even when that's exactly what I expected. Upstream Color and Escape from Tomorrow are just too far out there for me to enjoy.

Pretty Bad

87. Out of the Furnace
86. Closed Circuit
85. After Earth
84. Rest in Peace Department
83. The Family
82. Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs 2
81. Oz the Great and Powerful
80. Percy Jackson: Sea of Monsters
79. The Great Gatsby
78. Home Run
77. The Best Man Holiday
76. GI Joe: Retaliation

All these movies had fleeting peaks that stood out from their general badness. Two movies from this group really stand out though. Out of the Furnace wins the award for Most Deceptive Movie Trailer but at least I understood that Christian Bale was going to be looking for his brother, played by Casey Affleck, after the latter got into some trouble with some bad guys. Other than that, nothing from the trailer really lined up with the movie. Affleck's character is actually dead most of the movie and Bale is arrested during the first half. Bale doesn't actually beat very many people up and he gets some (probably bad) people killed indirectly.

After Earth shows us more of how great an actor Will Smith really is, here he plays a bit of an asshole, disconnected father. This movie was meant to help usher Jayden Smith further into the spotlight as an actor. And yet, Jayden really can't act. Or at least he's too uptight and robotic in this movie to demonstrate he has any of the skill or charisma his father possesses. We catch a glimpse of good Jayden in one of the final scenes where it doesn't seem like he's acting which is entirely possible since it is a touching moment with his father (the actor and the character).

Well at least we got those movies out of the way. We'll continue our climb through the ranks as we tackle another 25 movies in the next post.