In the millennial end-of-year frenzy of about a month ago, list-making ran rampant over every publication and media outlet of the free world. Traditionally, year-end lists celebrate the best a certain entertainment venue has to offer. But these are the movies that suckered you in, the movies that had a chance and blew it -- the true worst of the year.
- "The Blair Witch Project"
This will certainly be a controversial decision, but "The Blair Witch Project" deserves it. The beneficiary of unending hype from the early Spring through the beginnings of Fall, "Blair Witch" was called original, truly frightening and a number of other adjectives that had nothing to do with the content of this stinker.
The movie made over $150 million on the basis of a reported $100,000 investment by Artisan Entertainment. The film's success was a result of Artisan's marketing campaign.
Come on people. This is three annoying kids clearly working without an intelligible script facing a monster that ruffles their tent! The only thing scary about "The Blair Witch Project" is the final two seconds, which I will admit, scared the hell out of me. The rest, however, is unappealing actors being idiots.
- "The World is Not Enough"
While many enjoyed the latest installment in the Bond series, any true Bond fan had to be disgusted by Pierce Brosnan's latest run as the legendary superspy. "World" suffered from a number of problems.
First, the actors involved were generally weak. While Robert Carlyle is usually excellent, his weak character constrained him to moping around and demonstrating the stupid properties of the bullet in his head. Brosnan himself was uninspired and overly dependent on puns.
"World" also failed on a plot level. The plot was overly complicated and frankly, uninteresting. In an "Austin Powers" world, Bond needs a freshening to be taken seriously.
- "Wild Wild West"
Will Smith was an entertainment god coming into 1999. With ubiquitous singles and a string of hugely successful summer pictures, "Wild Wild West" seemed like the sure thing of the season. As the premiere grew nearer, more and more rumors began to leak regarding how horribly this film had turned out. They didn't tell the half of it.
"West" is a hodgepodge of awful dialogue, silly characters and an idiotic plot. The movie rests on a gigantic special effects budget and Will Smith's attitude, which reaches incredible proportions in this movie. Walking around and acting cool seems to be the sum total of Smith's character, Jim West.
Warner Brothers spent over $170 million on this movie. Studios sin most egregiously when putting resources enough for three or four feature films behind such an obvious bomb.
- "eXistenZ"
Since no one saw this, I hesitated to include David Cronenberg's latest foray into the ultra-weird, but "eXistenZ" is such a poor film that it really deserves the honor. Despite such misguided video box quotes like "Blows 'The Matrix' away," "eXistenZ" really is one horrible movie.
Jennifer Jason Leigh and the usually unimpeachable Jude Law star together as a hunted video game designer and her hapless bodyguard. The movie centers on video games that plug directly into humans, altering their perceptions of reality.
Leigh manages to both be uninteresting and unappealing while throwing in a good lack of sexiness to boot. Law accomplishes the incredible feat of losing all his charm, acting like a simpering fool. These skilled players simply could not bring anything to Cronenberg's misguided and uninventive script.
- "Double Jeopardy"
"Double Jeopardy" might have escaped this list had it not been so successful at the box office. From the first trailer, it's obvious that this is an uninteresting retread of both Ashley Judd's and Tommy Lee Jones' career defining moments, respectively, "Kiss the Girls" and "The Fugitive."
Ashley Judd is the woman falsely convicted of killing her still-living husband and Jones is the parole officer who has to stop her from finishing the job for good. Both are far from compelling in this thriller without thrills.
"Double Jeopardy" has no twists or turns, no interesting dialogue and is based on the ludicrous premise that Judd's character can kill her husband without possibility of retribution due to her previous conviction for the same crime. Smells like a studio concoction to me. "Double Jeopardy" is just one more entry in a long line of films that guarantee the production of schlock rather than quality.
