My Top 10 Least Favourite Movies of 2016

Happy New Year! :) And I'm sure many of us can't wait to turn our backs on 2016! This was quite possibly one of the worst years in recent memory; it was practically a never-ending string of bad news! Not only did the political climate mark a triumph for hate, discrimination and intolerance, and a severe blow to basic human decency and any sense of progression (at least, that's the way I see it), but it was a year so chock full of celebrity deaths that I saw a post floating around the Internet of people wanting to know what 2016's problem was! There was so much death and, like I said before, just general bad news all around us that I'm surprised the whole world didn't fall into depression!
But the world at large is not my passion. I don't care that much about current events; I care about movies. And, unfortunately, I have to share in everyone else's pessimism in that regard, because this was not a good year for me as a film buff. So much of this year's cinematic output was either mediocre or just plain bad that it just kept beating me down, leaving me wondering a few times if it was all worthwhile. But, thankfully, there were plenty of really good ones as well, so I usually had a happy place to recall and break that dejection. :)
And, before I start listing some specific examples, let me just remind you of the criteria I set for all these year-end lists. I'm only including movies I've actually seen; that's the only way I can form concrete opinions, after all. I don't count movies that haven't yet been seen outside of film festivals; they have to have been distributed for the general public to see. And, because international release dates open up a whole new can of worms, I judge strictly by its initial release according to IMDb. So if, like me, you live in the British Isles, you're not going to see Creed, Room or Spotlight on the best-of list, as they came out in the US in 2015.

Before that best-of list, however, I have to talk about the movies that made 2016 so unbearable for me. Like I said, when this year's movies were bad, they were shockingly bad! For the first time since I've been making these year-end lists, the worst-of top ten is comprised entirely of movies I rated one star (2/10 or less)! I'm not even kidding; every previous worst-of list has had at least one movie that scraped a 3/10!
It could potentially have been even worse, though, because I didn't see every movie that was reportedly bad. Towards the end of the year, I'd seen so many uninspiring movies in quick succession that I finally decided to do what most casual filmgoers would do: just refuse to see something I didn't want to. I avoided Fifty Shades of Black, for example, and several other comedies that look vexing, like Bad Moms, Keanu and especially Office Christmas Party. Needless to say, there were a fair few sequels this year as well, some of which followed movies I still haven't seen (namely Alice Through the Looking Glass and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows), while some were adding to movies I didn't like to begin with (i.e. Allegiant and The Purge: Election Year). Other miscellaneous poorly received movies include The Darkness, The Other Side of the Door, When the Bough Breaks, The Disappointments Room, Max Steel and Shut In. Then there's Assassin's Creed, which hasn't been released yet here in the British Isles.
And now, with all that aside, let's finally start talking about the worst of what I did see.

Runners-up:
Bad Neighbours 2 (AKA Neighbors 2: Sorority Rising)
Criminal
The Forest
Ghostbusters
Grimsby (known in the US as The Brothers Grimsby)
Misconduct
Norm of the North
Ratchet & Clank (one of four video game movies to come out this year!)

Related lists

View more top voted lists

Embed this list with widgets RSS Feed