Year in Movies Review Part 2: The Year in Bad Casting

Nicholas Cage Award for Most Egregious Sell-Out

• Kevin Costner – (Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit, 3 Days to Kill, Draft Day, Black or White) – This is one of those “he must really need money” lineups that makes you worry he did something worse than blow it all on coke. The genius of bankruptcy is that you can at least start from zero. How much could he have possibly owed? Did he short-sell Apple stock? Invest in a Saudi lumber factory? Try to solve the Gulf Oil Spill? OHHHHHHHHHHH...right. That.
• Angelina Jolie – Maleficent – The set-up is genius – Angelina plays the evil queen. It’s the role she was born for. And then she spends none of the movie being evil.
• Michael B. Jordan – That Awkward Moment – this movie has a lot of awkward moments. For example, when Zac Efron tries to have a feeling – his heart is the little engine that just quite couldn’t. Or when it dawns on the 3rd wheel friend that he's a poor man's Steve Guttenberg. But most of the awkward moments come when serious African American actor Michael B. Jordan tries to pretend he hangs out with these people socially. 
• Jennifer Lawrence – The Hunger Games Part 3a. Contractual obligation is no excuse when you’re a star.
• Legos – The Lego Movie – The  movie is good. Lego deftly positions itself as the corporation against corporations, which allows reviewers to embrace a genuinely good movie despite its rapacious marketing ploy. Given how dominant product placement has become in funding movies, we should at least credit legos for being honest. So is this even a sell-out? Of course it is. To do it, Lego sold out its biggest fans – those guys, generally engineers, who really do love complete lego sets and immaculately constructed lego temples. In order to get the reviews it needed, Lego had to tell them, “You’re doing it wrong.” I wasn’t a Lego kid, but I have to ask the question: are they? Isn’t there beauty in perfection just as well? Lego has embraced the conformity of non-conformism. This was shrewd in selling its movie but I question the wisdom of the business plan that tells your best customers to stop.

WINNER: Jennifer Lawrence. Each individual cash grab seems modest. By its nature, The Hunger Games is a tawdry teen reader cash shamwow. It helped launch Ms. Lawrence from rare bloom to pre-packed corsage and for that we’re thankful…thus far. Splitting up the finale has become a fashionable way to make more money, and when you divide something that’s less than one by two, you’re bound to come up with a bare fraction of a movie. The result is a film so devoid of action or consequence that we have to point the finger at its star. The producers will still make their money on the real finale; it’s too late for the audience to bow out. The only one diminished here is Ms. Lawrence; left to founder with no action, no script, and no consequence…for the first time, she’s just not any good. We are told she is starting a revolution, but following the script of the first two movies, a revolution is sold to us as a youtube channel and a makeover. They've turned Catniss into a poser.

Helen Mirren Award for Least Believable Female Action Hero

Given annually to the waifish starlet whose punch inexplicably lands harder than a Strella missile

• Emily Blunt – Edge of Tomorrow – This is a shaky nomination because she kind of pulls it off by bulking up and donning a giant machine fighting suit. Thanks for hitting the gym hard!
• Eva Green – 300 2 – Another shaky nomination because her primary fighting skill is gratuitous nudity, and oh what a skill it is. Somewhat believable.
• Scarlett Johanssen – Lucy AND Captain America 2 – At least in Lucy she’s supposed to have mental super powers…which is equally difficult to believe…but drug induced.
• Kiera Knightley – Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit – OK, so it’s not an action role, but this demands attention. In the space of 20 minutes, real time, we are expected to believe she goes from naïve wife of secret agent to master spy. Ridiculous.
• Jennifer Lawrence – Hunger Games 3A and X-Men: Days of Future Past – If ultimately her character can shift into any form, then just have her look like Jennifer Lawrence and hire an MMA girl to do the blue mutant.

WINNER: Scarlett Johanssen. She wins because she is neither believable as an action star nor, in these roles, even believable as an actress in a community college sketch. After spending last year taking roles like Her and Don Jon that made her seem like a real actress, Lucy and this Marvel character make Keanu Reeves seem like Lawrence Olivier.

The King of Queens Award for Most Ridiculous Pairing of Goofy Male and Attractive Female

Neighbors - Rose Byrne & Seth Rogen

Classic tubby goof married to smart, hot goddess. At least Knocked Up pretended to have an explanation.

Most Questionable Casting Decision

• Megan Fox is an irrepressible journalist – Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles
• Neil Patrick Harris is a loyal semi-creepster – Gone Girl
• Kevin Sorbo is a Professor of Philosophy – God’s Not Dead
• Keifer Sutherland is a Roman - Pompeii
• Aaron Taylor-Johnson is still employed as a lead  – Godzilla

WINNER: Kevin Sorbo. The former Hercules cannot even pronounce the names of the philosophers he’s brutalizing in this appalling Christian apologist triumphalist strawman film. Sorbo plays the arrogant professor of philosophy who bans God from his classroom and then turns his semester over to a random student with the temerity to protest. One guesses that casting Sorbo was the only way to make the moist, doe-eyed student’s inevitable triumph believable. And oh what a triumph – not only does Sorbo return to the flock, but so too does everyone else…the entire philosophy class converts!

Sorbo was obviously hired because he’s Christian, and not at all an arrogant philosophy professor, missing the opportunity to create some dramatic tension about the outcome. This is the perfect role for an actual arrogant prick like Steve Coogan. But the script is cast at too low a brow to have an interesting debate on this topic.

While I’m on the topic of this movie, it’s shockingly, Old Testament-y cruel. A girl gets cancer? Welcome to DUMPSVILLE! Muslim girl wants to convert in the only moving plot-line in the script? Time for a family beating! The death bed conversion is usually the cruelest argument for belief, but this movie poses the “convert if you want to bone your hottie student” argument as an earnest competitor. Until…no…YES! They combine them by killing Sorbo while he’s trying to chase down the hottie – that’s right, it’s a dying-in-the-street-trying-to-track-down-hottie-student-to-bone conversion. 

Cruder still, this movie is littered with tits and ass. There are multiple tracking shots that open scenes with gratuitous women’s booty shots. The only real philosophical question the movie poses is, “Can non-hotties be Christian too?”

The North Korean Regime Made Me Do It Award for Big Star in Terrible Movie

We are suspending this category indefinitely. After what happened to The Interview, let us all hope that the North Korean regime never makes anyone in Hollywood ever do anything against their will again.