The 20 Worst Films Of 2017 So Far

Don’t you just haaaate good movies (like the ones we counted down last week in our 25 Best Films of 2017 So Far)? Aren’t you just sick and bloody tired of walking out of a theater feeling entertained, refreshed and intellectually challenged, or switching off your TV at night having been caught up in a beautifully imagined world that seemed to spring fully formed from the mind of an inventive and uncompromising filmmaker? I know we are! So here’s the midyear feature that we just love to bring you, that we look forward to for weeks beforehand, for which doing the research is not a horrible chore at all and which doesn’t even a little bit make us lose the will to live!

[Runs out of nitrous] Ok, not exactly, but bad movies, it must be remembered, do perform a valuable service in reminding us what good movies are, by not being them. Here, to reset your quality bar so low that, with luck, the rest of the year’s releases will coast over it with ease, are our 20 picks for the Worst Films of 2017 So Far.

“King Arthur: Legend Of The Sword” [our review]
“I’m trying to tell a story here and you keep interrupting” says Charlie Hunnam at some point in the interminable jumble of flash edits, unmotivated slo-mo and bombastic hero shots that comprise “King Arthur: Legend Of The Sword.” It makes sense if you imagine the line is spoken by Guy Ritchie, director of disposably enjoyable entertainments like “Snatch” and even “Sherlock Holmes,” to his alter ego, Guy Ritchie, director of such disasters as “Revolver” and “Swept Away.” Mistaking an “iconoclastic” take on a legend for a bludgeoningly uninvolving mockney revamp, the great Arthurian legend (or about 1/16th of it, so’s to leave some stuff for all the sequels this won’t get) is reduced to a lot of bringing things to places: a staff to a tower, a sword to a castle, a mage to a cave etc. There’s some OK CG along the way and sometimes Hunnam even sounds convinced by the words emerging from his marf, innit, but mostly this addition to the King Arthur canon is actually a subtraction.

“Rings”
It’s something of a golden age of the horror movie: whether indies like “The Witch” or “It Comes At Night” or more mainstream fare like “Get Out” and “Don’t Breathe,” fans are positively spoiled for choice, which makes a drab, will-this-do unwanted sequel like “Rings” all the more infuriating. Gore Verbinski’s 2002 “The Ring” was a rare remake to come close to the original, but its 2005 sequel was dire, and twelve years later, this semi-reboot from director J. Javier Gutiérez is even worse. Drab-looking, attempting to bring its long-haired, TV-crawling well ghost into the digital era much too late, incredibly boringly plotted (not least because it’s going over old ground), imagination-free in its attempts to scare you, and with a selection of the dullest characters ever to grace in the genre, in the shape of Boring College Student (Matilda Lutz), More Boring Boyfriend (Alex Roe) and College Professor (The One That’s Not Sheldon From “Big Bang Theory”). A strong contender for the worst on this list.

“The Mummy” [our review]
Contrary to most critics we are of the belief there is one thing that Alex Kurtzman‘s “The Mummy” does very, very well: it vindicates all of us who have kept the fires burning for Stephen Sommers’ 1999 version through the past two decades. “The Mummy” (1999) is a rousing, giggly, tongue-in-cheek actioner that represented a career high point for star Brendan Fraser, who had good chemistry with soon-to-be Oscar-winning co-star Rachel Weisz. “The Mummy” (2017) is completely the inverse of all those things. Not only one of the worst career choices Tom Cruise has ever made, it’s also one of his worst performances: he’s become far too interesting an actor to play this vacuous a character. But hey, he comes out of it better than Russell Crowe whose lumbering Dr Exposition and Mr Hyde has the unenviable task of tying together this new Dark Universe, which, after “The Mummy” is the mother of all unwanted mega-franchises.

“The Space Between Us” [our review]
The aim of upstart distributor STX is laudable: making the kind of wide-release, grown-up, non-franchise movies that studios don’t focus on much these days. But if they keep making stuff like “The Space Between Us,” they’re not going to be in business all that much longer. A sort of sci-fi/“Boy In The Bubble” hybrid, it follows a young boy born on Mars (Asa Butterfield) who comes to Earth to find his internet pen-pal (Britt Robertson), only to discover that his presence on an alien planet threatens to kill him. Directed with maximum saccharinity by Peter Chelsom, it’s one of those movies you look at and wonder who in the world it’s meant to be for: it skews younger and more sexlessly than a John Green YA adaptation, the space stuff is mostly irrelevant and not well capitalized on by Allan Loeb’s dull script, and the leads have less than no chemistry together.

“Rupture” [our review]
A watered-down take on the torture porn genre is honestly not even something that would normally blip on our radar enough to make it onto one of these lists. But “Rupture” has the further bad fortune of starring a ludicrously overquailfied cast and coming from a director who in the past has made a genuine subversive classic. That film was “Secretary,” the director is Steven Shainberg and the cast includes Noomi Rapace as the torturee and Michael Chiklis, Peter Sormare, Lesley Manville and Kerry Bishe as her inexplicably motivated torturers. The film follows a young mother’s abduction to a dank, oddly lit facility in which experiments in fear (including a helmet filled with spiders) are conducted on her, and even has the gall to nod to “The Shining” in a particular wallpaper pattern. In every particular, except perhaps Rapace who seems, depressingly, rather at home here, “Rupture” is made of parts that deserve so much better than its grubby, silly whole.