After an extremely pleasant couple of hours in the pub watching Everton beat Liverpool on Saturday afternoon (rising to the dizzy heights of second in the table in the process), Sal and I decided to pop to the Screen on the Green for an early evening film. If you’ve yet to experience the, um, “pleasures” of David O. Russell’s I Heart Huckabees, my advice would be this: don’t. It wasn’t quite the worst film I have ever seen, but would probably figure somewhere in the top (or should that be bottom?) five. Anyway, that set me thinking about my least favourite films of all time, and I came up with this list. Tragically, in all but one of these cases I actually made a decision to go to the cinema and pay money to see these turkeys (and the one I didn’t see in the cinema was probably never released in the UK anyway). What was I thinking?
5. Love, Actually–Richard Curtis-by-numbers, as Working Title takes their own brand of BritRomCom to its logical conclusion by making a film featuring all the trademark components of a middle-America-friendly, “hit” British film, including a plethora of bankable star names, but unfortunately forgets to include minor things like a plot, believable characters and a point. Quite poor, actually.
4. The Avengers–truly awful film version of the TV show that even Eddie Izzard (inexplicably featured in a non-speaking role) can’t save.
3. I Heart Huckabees–A first year philosophy student of a film: smug, pretentious rubbish that clearly believes in its own cleverness, full of knowingly quirky characters who say things like “have you ever transcended space and time?”. What’s that you say? It’s a satire? That’s no excuse. It’s. Just. Bad.
2. The Next Best Thing–Madonna vanity project that I had the misfortune to see in a bar in Malaysia. It’s only redeeming feature is probably the fact that it might not be as bad as Swept Away (but that can’t be in my list because I didn’t see it). I’m not sure this film ever had a theatrical release in the UK although we did have to endure the release of her version of American Pie, which features in the movie (Madonna and her friends sing it during someone’s funeral, I believe).
1. Love, Honour, and Obey. Post-Lock Stock lottery funded British gangster films reach their lowest point in this Ray Winstone/Rhys Ifans/Jude/Sadie/Jonny Lee Miller gangster comedy. It’s Improvised! The characters have the same names as the actors! It’s… bad. Wrong. In many ways. Categorically the worst film I have ever seen.