Dubious Achievements Part 4: Genre Awards

Make It Stop Award for Worst or Least Necessary Sequel, Non-Animated:

• A Good Day to Die Hard
• Grown Ups 2
• Kick-Ass 2
• Paranormal Activity 5
• Red 2 

DISQUALIFIED AFTER PROMISING TO STOP: The Hangover Part 3

WINNER: Grudge Match. 

Surprise! Grudge Match is an original film you say? No, it is a Rocky sequel. In fact, it is also a Rocky parody. And it is a Rocky remake, since it reuses the plot-line from the last Rocky movie. This makes it the world's first Requarody. Robert DeNiro shows up to ape his role in Raging Bull, which is halfway down the infamy-405 to a Scary Movie version of Schindler's List. In reality, Robert DeNiro shows up to collect a paycheck in exchange for getting in shape. If he has to appear on screen and say a few lines, well, so does the bulimic chick from The Biggest Loser. Which leads me to Sylvester Stallone. When he made the loving if tedious Rocky Balboa, everyone agreed to smile and say nice things so that Mr. Stallone could retire gracefully. After all, he appears to be stitched together by plastic surgery and deer antler spray. Instead, he mistook this as an invitation to make a comeback. Eric Hoffer is often misquoted as saying that every great cause starts out as a movement, becomes a business, and ends up a racket. Mr. Stallone's second movement has reached "racket" phase multo crescendo. Speaking of which...he's making The Expendables 3. If it's as bad as it looks, we may have to rechristen this the Stallone, Make It Stop Award. 

Worst Reboot:

• Evil Dead
• The Lone Ranger
• Oz, The Great and the Powerful

WINNER: The Evil Dead

 The Lone Ranger is an American icon, and you can't make a movie about an icon while trying to stuff your revisionist history into it. The boomer nostalgia audience is offended and the millenial adolescent male is just perplexed. Otherwise, it's an OK flick. Oz, however, foregoes the original book's revisionist Gold-Silver debate history in favor of angling at the starting point of the classic film. The result is brilliant on the reel-ends: you get the  black-and-white James Franco doing the opening monologue as an inspired fake wizard and then setting up the original film on the back end with the same schtick. Unfortunately, in the middle, the introduction of color brings with it the uninterested Oscar-host James Franco. Enter Rachel Weisz, Michelle Williams, and Mila Kunis competing for least interesting witch. Mr. Franco opens the envelope and the remarkably untalented Kunis is the winner by a landslide. 

Evil Dead, however, is a stillborn concept - it's trying to take an occult classic and reboot it as a moneymaking franchise. But all it really achieves is convincing you that neither this, nor any of the originals, are any good, and that the genre it started has been beaten to undeath.

Best/Worst Laughably Bad Action Movie:

• After Earth 
• Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters
• The Last Stand
• Oblivion
• Pacific Rim

DISQUALIFIED BECAUSE I'VE ALREADY HAD ENOUGH FUN AT STALLONE'S EXPENSE: Bullet to the Head

WINNER OF BEST LAUGHABLY BAD ACTION MOVIE: Pacific Rim

WINNER OF WORST LAUGHABLY BAD ACTION MOVIE: After Earth

Pacific Rim gets laughably bad action right: big effects, silly both in concept and execution, Ron Perlman playing an alien organ gray market broker named Hannibal Chau. We are not promised a good movie. We are promised a Godzilla movie. After Earth gets laughably bad action wrong. Its effects are forgettable, it is silly only in executing its serious conceit, and, most eggregiously, neither Ron Perlman, nor any sort of comic relief, organ broker or otherwise, is provided. Jaden Smith cannot be a star just because his father wills it. Just ask Francis Ford Coppola and Aaron Spelling. But putting his son in this monstrosity, at his own expense, seems like a matter to be taken up with child protective services. Either Mr. Smith dislikes his son or this was the most expensive down payment on a film school application in world history.

Adam Sandler/Jack Black Award for Shockingly Unfunny Comedy:

• Identity Thief
• The Heat
• Grown Ups 2

WINNER: Grown Ups 2.

I'm probably being unfair to Melissa McCarthy. She is funny, just overexposed. Identity Thief was noticeably worse than The Heat. Besides, Adam Sandler wanted this award all to himself. Jack Black, you are off the hook.

Best Idea Poorly Executed:

• 2 Guns - Denzel and Marky Mark are buddy renegade heroes with too silly a plot to save.
• Admission - Tina Fey and Paul Rudd are in a romantic comedy that is neither romantic nor a comedy. It's so unfunny I could not nominate it for the Adam Sandler Award because I am not sure it was intended to be a comedy.
• Gangster Squad - Everyone famous and popular as of last January gets together to make a movie about classic Hollywood gangsters that murders the history and appears to have hastily edited out all of the period style and character development scenes
• GI Joe: Retaliation - The Rock arrives to rescue a dismal launch, develops chemistry with Channing Tatum, then watches Tatum get blown away early in the movie. Lower-range Rock antics ensue. Bruce Willis arrives to try to re-rescue a failing script by Dying Hard. The Rock flexes his pecks.
• 42/Mandela/Lee Daniels' The Butler - Multiple attempts made to demonstrate that somehow it is possible to make not one but many bad movies about our Civil Rights Movement heroes. Thank goodness no one tried a Dr. King biopic; this year was jinxed.

WINNER: Lee Daniels' The Butler. The idea is simple - Oprah brings you the African American Forrest Gump, without the mentally-handicapped subplot and Hollywood-disapproved reactionary politics. What went wrong? The Oprah-brings-you part. The presidential vignettes are too long to be clever and too short to be anything more than caricatures. The love story is missing. The movie prefers to air its political message commercials at the expense of its human interest story. Oprah sends the sense of humor into the back room far too early and forgets to call it back out until the credits are about to roll. And through it all, there she is, awkwardly pleading for an Oscar nomination that will not, and should not, come.