By As we award the best of 2012 with shiny golden dino statues it’s important to note that sometimes movies aren’t good. Sometimes movies are really, really, really, really, really, ridiculously bad. And we don’t mean bad simply in the fact that they’re poorly made or look terrible, we mean bad in that they sucked on levels that hurt us. Things like disappointment and coherence factor in just as much as whether or not you can see a boom mic on the screen half the time, if not more so.
As such there may have been films that were more poorly made than our winner, but no movie sucked more overall. It’s a dubious distinction to go home with a tarnished golden dactyl, but one movie has to do it…
It’s possible that Taken 2 could have won this award simply by being disappointing without truly sucking. The fact is, however, that it wasn’t just disappointing, it was a downright terrible movie. Somehow, the sequel to the film that made Liam Neeson an action badass is the one film since then that has made him look like what he actually is: a middle-aged guy who isn’t in that great of shape. How could they blow this so tremendously? First they got a director who clearly has no idea what a coherent action sequence is and then they made the movie about Neeson’s daughter saving the day and not him. The thing that made the first Taken awesome was Liam Neeson being awesome, not him yelling at his daughter to try to be awesome. As if you weren’t already bored enough by the time the end of the film rolls around the final “battle” between Neeson and his rival is so mishandled that it ruins any sense of closure that the piss poor excuse for a movie could have given its audience. Full Review (Editor’s Note: Sean appears to be one of the few people on earth to have remotely enjoyed this movie).
It’s tough to say that Taken 2 was worse than any of our other worst film nominees, but it was easily the most disappointing. I don’t think anyone thought that Wrath of the Titans was actually going to be enjoyable and people would have had to go watch The Raven in order for it to be disappointing. Act of Valor was just a budget advertisement for the military so it’s hard to really get upset with it for being exactly what it was supposed to be, and Paperboy can at least pretend it was being artsy with its sex and weirdness. Don’t get me wrong, all these movies were bad for a wide variety of reasons, but none of them came close to the complete 180 that Taken 2 pulled.
