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Top 5 Most Disappointing Movies of 2014

The award season nominations are starting to pour in and the calendar is nearing its Decembers’ end.  That can only mean one thing! It’s time to look back on this year in cinema!  

Now, while the Golden Globes and the Academy Awards mind their time by heralding excellence on film, allow me to bear the burden of analyzing the dreck that Hollywood spat at us instead.  It’s a dirty job but someone’s gotta do it.

So, in order to keep things interesting – and also to save face and not have it seem like I go see crappy movies for no reason – here are the Most Disappointing Movies of 2014.

 5. Dumb and Dumber To

We asked for it, so it’s hard to rank this any lower.   Nearly twenty years to the day, audiences were re-introduced to Harry and Lloyd played by the now established and seasoned mega-stars Jeff Daniels and Jim Carrey.  

The movie played out like a long delayed whisp of a whoopie cushion.  An old, archaic joke that just didn’t land.  Sure there were some nostalgic yuks to be found somewhere in what seems like the Farrelly Bros’ trillionth consecutive whiff.  However, they were too often stifled – bookended by outdated and offensive nonsense.

 4. Need for Speed

Maybe this would have worked during the multi-season run of the TV phenomenon that was Breaking Bad.  Maybe then, it wouldn’t feel so deflating to watch Aaron Paul – the same man who just relented his performance of Jesse Pinkman – futz around in a lifeless car crash of a movie.   

 3. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles

How do we reboot the Turtles?  That question has loomed over many an office meeting somewhere in Hollywood over the years.  Despite their relentless desire to bring this movie franchise back from the dead was to not only use charmless and chunky mo-cap models for the turtles, but to throw them in the background.  

That’s right.  We waited about twenty years for a live action TMNT movie just to see the whole film be dedicated to making Megan Fox’s April O’Neill seem like the most important facet of both the film and of Turtles lore.

2. Sin City 2: A Dame to Kill For

It turns out that if you spend nearly a decade in and out of development hell, you don’t tease an audience into being desperate to go see your movie.  

In fact, you might just get the opposite with Sin City 2: A Dame to Kill For, which not only did nobody seem to pay to see – but if you did, you left with a bad taste in your mouth.  What maybe could have been a sexy sequel to its decadent predecessor became a lopsided, rushed mess.

1. Transcendance

Transcendance. Sheesh. What happened here?  You have the first directorial feature from Christopher Nolan’s stunning director of photography Wally Pfister.  On top of that, you’ve got Johnny Depp as your poster boy, with Morgan Freeman and the lovely Rebecca Hall to cushion the blow.  Yet, it seemed that nothing could have saved these masters of their craft from looking lost and embarrassed.  The script is so poor, all it asks of its main players (who all play characters of high intellect) to act like buffoons.