Our Kam Williams was able to take the worst Hollywood had to offer this year and produce a list of the 10 worst movies of 2000. Of course, there were several movies deserving of honorable mention on this list as well.
By: Kam Williams
!["Adam]("/local/Z/ZWIRE1091/zwire/images/nicky.jpg")
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| Adam Sandler, right, along with his canine, top the list of this year’s worst films with Little Nicky. |
It was an excellent year for movies with Gladiator, Frequency, Bamboozled, What Lies Beneath, Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon and Remember the Titans among my big-budget favorites. As an arbiter of contemporary culture, my job has been to sort out the good, the bad and the irredeemable among each year’s thousand or so releases to help you avoid making the wrong mistake.
Today I’d like to pay homage to those wrong mistakes, those films objectionable enough to inspire a Buddhist monk to self immolation. Although I have never been moved to pour gasoline over my head, I have sometimes sat in that darkened theater wondering whether God might be testing me. Before I zero in on the ten biggest lemons, I’d be remiss not to give Dishonorable Mention to some of the flicks that almost made the list.
There’s the blasphemous Jesus’ Son, about God’s grandson, a junkie with an unprintable nickname who is also a perverted Peeping Tom. Personally, I’d rather bathe with lepers. Outrageous, drag queen Ru Paul is also worth mentioning, miscast unrecognizably, mild-mannered and straight in But I’m a Cheerleader. There was nothing to do but cringe during this inadvertently insensitive comedy about a lesbian sent to a gay deprogramming rehab.
Sandra Bullock’s 28 Days made its own feeble attempt at detox center humor, this time through booze and drug jokes. On the subject of Sandra, she also foisted the forgettable Gun Shy on her fans, the lamest of the Analyze This rip-offs.
Groove, an exploration of the rave phenomenon, celebrated teen drug use and indiscriminate sex. Turn It Up, featuring profane rappers Pras and Ja Rule, should’ve been titled "Turn It Off." Once, I stepped on my cat’s tail by accident and that sounded more melodic. John Travolta looked lost in Battleship Earth, a silly, sci-fi based on a book written by L. Ron Hubbard. Any stronger comment here might be subpoenaed and land me in court with a Scientology attorney.
Sorry sequels Godzilla 2000 and Pokemon 2000 officially signaled the end of millennium mania. And why does rap star Ice Cube waste time acting when he could be in the recording studio? He delivered another catatonic performance in Next Friday, a lame-brained sequel to the lame-brained Friday.
Finally, Poor White Trash, the first whitesploitation flick, depicted a redneck reality so pathetic it was funny, except it wasn’t funny. Robert Redford’s The Legend of Bagger Vance warranted serious consideration as the year’s lousiest adaptation of a book to the silver screen. An unrecognizable version of the best-seller about race, class and golf in 1930s Georgia. This sanitized Hollywood version may as well have been set in present-day Disney World.
Now for the 10 Worst, from horrible to horrid, saving most vile for the very last:
10. Castaway. Too tame after we’ve all seen CBS TV’s Survivor series. Where’s the rats, the snakes, the maggot-infected wounds? Even The Harlem Globetrotters on Gilligan’s Island was a more compelling marooned movie. Tom Hanks’ weight loss, mud-man beard and Sun In-lightened dreads are no substitute for character development.
9. Bounce. Real-life lovers Ben Affleck and Gwyneth Paltrow brought no chemistry to the set of this comedy about a creep who puts the moves on the grieving widow of the guy he gave his plane ticket to.
8. Blair Witch 2. Gruesome, decapitation-heavy sequel to a hokey, cheap-looking original. This installment features steadier, hi-tech camera work that leaves nothing to the imagination except whose head is really going to roll for this $50 million money-burning coven.
7. Ladies Man. Saturday Night Live’s annual contribution to the Ten Worst List. An adaptation of a SNL skit about a love advice therapist whose only advice to female callers is to mate with him. When you stretch a bad SNL skit, then a stretched, bad, SNL skit is what you git.
6. Nurse Betty. Another inscrutable TV-as-reality jaw-dropper, à la The Truman Show. Pouty Rene Zellweger plays an airhead so in love with a soap opera M.D. that she’s oblivious to hitmen trailing her. Turned the theater into a torture chamber.
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| Bruce Willis, right, throws his hands up in disgust over the script for The Kid, as his co-star, Spencer Breslin, looks on. |
5. Disney’s The Kid. A crass attempt to cash in on Bruce Willis’ success with The Sixth Sense by quickly tossing any ole bull stance up on the screen. Represents a small step down for director Jon Turtletaub, whose Instinct checked-in at number 6 on last year’s list. In summation, a cut-and-paste compendium of pilfered scenes, underscored by an elevator-muzak score and 12 Step-truism dialogue. Do you feel my pain?
4. Drowning Mona. Dark comedy with Bette Midler as a town shrew who everybody wants dead. This abysmal script abandons a talented cast, including Danny DeVito, Jamie Lee Curtis and Neve Campbell. The film never made me laugh once. It seemed deliberately bad, so I asked the studio rep. at my screening if I was on Candid Camera.
3. Bait. The only thing I liked about Bait was that it meant that I only needed to find 9 more films for my 10 Worst List. Jamie Foxx stars as a genetically-inclined criminal who won’t stop breaking the law for any amount of money from the Feds. This patently offensive running-joke refutes the idea that social factors might play a part in criminal behavior.
2. Beautiful. Minnie Driver as a spoiled, vain, petty, insensitive, grotesque creature who denies her own daughter’s existence in order to win a beauty pageant. No one buys her tearful, last-minute transformation after two-hours as a loathsome monster. Blame director Sally Field for this self-hating, misogynistic mess.
1. Little Nicky. Too bad I couldn’t just write, "This stinks!" I don’t think Adam Sandler would be offended in the least if I said he had no identifiable talent other than feigning cretinism. Little Nicky is an intolerably sophomoric, irreligious, unimaginative compendium of tasteless skits. In the title role, Adam plays the son of the Devil sent to Earth to find his brother. Unwatchable. I defy you try.
Now we can turn the page on the worst of 2000. Ring out the old, ring in the new. Ever the optimist, I’m ready to take on the New Year’s offerings, even if it’s a little like running the bulls in Pamplona in a bright red jumpsuit.