The Sordid Seven
(The Worst Movies of 2000)
Although it didn’t signal the end of the world, the year 2000 was an exceptionally poor year for movie lovers. Coming after a year of such quality that pundits were predicting a revival of the 70’s auteur boom, this year’s sudden downturn bore a strange similarity to the fate of dot-com startups on the NASDAQ index. Faster than you could say “poor notices,” a wave of crappy movies washed over us like that towering breaker in The Perfect Storm. The most disheartening trend this year was the Pointless 70’s Remake—witness Shaft, Gone in 60 Seconds, Bedazzled, Charlie’s Angels, Get Carter, etc., etc.—a trend that proved last year’s pundits only half right. Also enjoying a resurgence was gross-out humour. The Farrelly brothers traded on the success of their 1998 smash There’s Something About Mary with Me, Myself & Irene, while the Wayans brothers scored a huge hit with Scary Movie, which featured a man getting spiked through the head with an erect penis. Come to think of it, maybe 2000 was the end of the world.
Normally we pick seven movies to single out for punishment, a sort of “seven cinematic sins” that wasted our time and money. But this year was such an off year for movies, we’ve decided to add an eighth selection. It’s only fitting, considering how overwhelmingly the year’s lousy films outnumbered the good ones.
As an added bonus, we’ve included two “dishonourable mention” movies so crappy, we didn’t even see them!
Bless the Child – Kim Basinger, the Pets.com of the Hollywood Stock Exchange, continued her streak of post-L.A. Confidential duds with this blasphemous nonsense about a messianic little girl threatened by a new-age Satanist. Do what thou wilt, but stay the hell away from this movie.
Dude, Where’s My Car? – Dude, where’s the humour? This mind-numbingly stupid stoner fantasy couldn’t even make a pot-smoking dog seem funny, let alone career dimwits Seann William Scott and Ashton Kutcher.
Dungeons & Dragons – Basing a feature film on the pen-and-paper-thin plots of the popular role-playing game was a bad idea. Robbing it of the game’s imaginative appeal was a far worse one. We hope a benevolent wizard locks this film away in a magically sealed dungeon for all eternity.
Eye of the Beholder – Blame Canada for this made-in-Montreal pile of merde. Ewan McGregor went from Obi-Wan to just plain wan, and Ashley Judd failed to convince us that she deserves better than third-rate thrillers. Apparently, talent is in the eye of the director.
Gone in 60 Seconds – The most pointless of the year’s Pointless 70’s Remakes (and that’s saying a great deal), this Nicolas Cage/Angelina Jolie lemon featured Dukes of Hazzard-level writing and worse acting. Watching it was like inhaling the tailpipe emissions from a ‘67 Shelby GT500 for two hours—sleep-inducing and damn hard on the brain cells.
Mission to Mars – Written by the same two hacks as last year’s worst movie (Wild Wild West), and directed in Brian De Palma’s haphazard, openly derivative style, this mission should have been scrubbed on the launchpad. Woe to anybody who went in thinking they’d be seeing Tom Cruise in a John Woo movie.
Nutty Professor II: The Klumps – Eddie Murphy served up an unwanted second helping of lumpy, Klumpy gravy—fatty, tasteless, and poorly prepared. We sent it back to the kitchen with our lowest review of the year.
Shanghai Noon – Warning to all Jackie Chan fans: if a Chinese guy named Chon Wang in a Western called Shanghai Noon is your cup of green tea, feel free to rent this drivel and laugh your mentally-challenged ass off. Otherwise, spare yourself the sight of your hero in what amounts to an Oriental minstrel show and pick up The Legend of Drunken Master instead.
There’s no question that these movies were awful. Just thinking about them again makes us want to run out and see Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon again, to get the taste of them out of our mouths. But before we do, we have one more thankless task to get out of the way. You see, there are two movies we failed to mention. Even more than the ones listed above, these two atrocities were responsible for making 2000 a year to forget. In fact, they were so bad we couldn’t bring ourselves to see them. Luckily, you didn’t need a critic to tell you to avoid them; the box office numbers spoke for themselves. Still, we’d be remiss if we didn’t at least mention these two unmentionables:
Little Nicky – Adam Sandler’s Son of Satan was a sneering moron with a bad haircut and horrid fashion sense. In other words, Adam Sandler.
Battlefield Earth – John Travolta’s ill-advised vanity project, an adaptation of L. Ron Hubbard’s notorious tome, was a sneaky attempt to drop a Scientology tract into a theater near you. Fortunately, nobody picked it up.
As always, we want to hear from you. Drop us a line and let us know which films you think should have made the list, and which ones don’t belong there. We’re always happy to hear the opinions of others before disregarding them completely.