We asked film critic Alonso Duralde to look back and pick the worst movie of each of the past five years. If you saw one (or more) of these, you get bad-movie bragging rights.
2011: This year’s only about two-thirds over, but here’s hoping no movie yet to be released will be as soul-sucking as “Just Go With It,” a witless farce that felt like three years in a hard labor camp. Not even the presence of rom-com queen Jennifer Aniston could rescue this dud from the doldrums of Adam Sandler’s overbearingly stupid brand of comedy, which makes that kid in your second-grade class who made farts with his armpits seem like George Bernard Shaw by comparison.
2010: Even fans of the first movie looked away in embarrassment as “Sex and the City 2” unspooled on screens, putting a harsh, comedy-killing heaviness on all the smutty one-liners and making these once-beloved characters seem like the most vapid, shrewish, and empty-headed ladies on the planet. Add an embarrassing Liza Minnelli cameo and a karaoke butchering of “I Am Woman,” and you’ve got a recipe for estrogen-laden disaster.
2009: Speaking of crimes against womankind, Katherine Heigl once again made her entire gender look like marriage-mad morons in “The Ugly Truth.” By the time Heigl’s shrill ice queen and Gerard Butler’s knuckle-dragging chauvinist wind up in a hot-air balloon, you’ll be hoping for a Hindenburg-style finale.
2008: Mike Myers doing silly voices and sending up Swinging London spy spoofs in the Austin Powers movies? Funny. Mike Myers doing silly voices and channeling his inner Deepak Chopra? Not at all funny — at least, not in “The Love Guru,” a thoroughly painful and laugh-free experience that also tosses in Justin Timberlake as a sex-crazed French Canadian hockey star and Ben Kingsley as a potty-mouthed spiritual guide.
2007: We may never know if the early-2007 release of “Norbit” — featuring Eddie Murphy as a nerdy nebbish, a morbidly obese woman, and an old Asian man — torpedoed any chance that Murphy had of winning an Oscar for the previous year’s “Dreamgirls.” But after this disaster, he certainly deserved some degree of punishment. Disgusting without being clever, loud but never funny, “Norbit” is the kind of movie that makes you want to give up on movies. Or on humanity.