5. The Da Vinci Code (2006)
Box Office: $758 million RT Score: 25%
“The Da Vinci Code” is based on the bestselling book by Dan Brown with the same name. This film is directed by Ron Howard (“Apollo 13”) and starred Tom Hanks in the lead role.
The plot follows a centuries-old conspiracy holding an important fact: that Jesus Christ was actually married to Mary Magdalene. Unsurprisingly, the church is desperately trying to cover up this shocking truth, so much so that they’re willing to kill and die for it. There’s also the other side of people who are also willing to kill and die to unveil it.
Why it’s terrible: The premise of this film was quite controversial on its own, but aside from that, it had a couple of issues that made it a terrible film.
First, it had a lot of uninteresting and long conversation shots that are boring as hell, which is why a two-and-a-half hour long movie felt like it was a 20-hour film. Second, the performances in this film were also not that great; while it did have Hanks in the lead role, surprisingly he delivered one of the worst performances of his career.
As one of the biggest Tom Hanks fans around, I can say that his acting in the film is surprisingly dull. Some people may want to blame the book, because he’s playing the character exactly as it’s written in the book, and his character in the book is itself uncharismatic and boring.
But that’s just an excuse; the actor must adapt a character to make it more appealing. Some characters may work on the pages of a novel, but are way more uninteresting in a film. Overall, the main character in this film was not interesting enough to follow.
This movie isn’t an action-adventure film but rather a political drama, so it absolutely depends on good performances from its actors, who, aside from one or two, unfortunately failed to deliver. The final product wasn’t the same as the director might have expected, but it made enough money to get a sequel.
4. Pearl Harbor (2001)
Box Office: $449 million RT Score: 25%
“Pearl Harbor” is a dramatic retelling of the infamous Japanese attack at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. This film won an Oscar for Best Sound Editing and was nominated for Best Sound, Best Visual Effects, and Best Original Song. It has also generated several other accolades in the “worst” categories such as worst film, worst actors, and worst director.
Why it’s terrible: First of all, don’t expect this movie to be anything like the war dramas that have previously appeared in cinema, such as “Schindler’s List” and “Saving Private Ryan”. Instead, “Pearl Harbor” is a movie directed by Michael Bay, who turned it into a mixture of cheesy dialogue, stupid love drama, illogical reasons for events, historical inaccuracies, and a heavy load of CGI.
While the screenplay and acting are the weakest points of the film, the fact that they injected a romantic love triangle consisting of three Americans in this kind of film makes it even worse.
The impression of Bay’s bad direction can be seen throughout the entire film. Just like his other works, this one is also contains several chunks of patriotism, racism and sexism. It was needlessly extended for a whopping three hours with an overdose of action sequences that the audience didn’t even care about.
3. Transformers: Age of Extinction (2014)
Box Office: $1.1 billion RT Score: 18%
“Transformers: Age of Extinction” was marketed as a soft reboot of the series, and in this installment, the cast has significantly changed. Mark Wahlberg plays the protagonist, and couple of good actors are also in it, but that doesn’t matter because they didn’t sign onto this movie to act.
The plot revolves around Wahlberg’s character, who is an unsuccessful engineer, and accidentally finds an alien truck, which gets him dragged into a fight between Autobots, Decepticons, and human beings.
Why it’s terrible: There’s nothing wrong with people watching fights between gigantic robots and mechanical dinosaurs. It’s cool to watch Optimus Prime riding a Grimlock and ripping up bad guys, but other than that, this installment had nothing good or new to offer. The problem is that all the Transformers films look almost identical.
All of them are divided into three different acts; the first act is all about character introduction that undoubtedly is the most boring, the second act has some tension build up between the government and aliens, and finally, the climactic third act, which is nothing more than a slew of visual effects and explosions.
The third act of “Transformers: Age of Extinction” felt like a punishment to me, one that Michael Bay wanted to give boys because we love explosions. He gave so many explosions in the end that it made our stomachs sick and brains begging for mercy.
Even the transformations were terrible in this film. Some new Autobots break into little cubes and rearrange them, but it didn’t look cool at all; it looked like the work of lazy visual effects artists, not to mention the weird sound during the transformation. The visual effects in this film were worse than in any previous Transformers film, including the first one.
However, the worst part is, we got tired of watching this movie after 90 minutes because it felt extremely boring, and we were expecting this movie to end soon, but no, it stretches for another 80 minutes. Bay is the only director who managed to make a movie boring with explosions and crashes. Nonetheless, it was an instant smash hit, mostly in overseas markets.
2. The Twilight Saga
Box Office: $3.3 billion RT Score: 39% avg
Sometimes it’s hard to believe that an absurdly inconsistent franchise, which revolves around a love triangle containing some of the most boring characters in film history, along with some cheap visual effects, made more than $3 billion at the box office with only five movies. We’ve included the entire Twilight Saga because we couldn’t choose just one – they are all equally terrible.
Why it’s terrible: The entire Twilight Saga essentially revolves around a love triangle involving three main characters named Edward, Bella and Jacob.
Edward is a good-looking dude who has quite the dominant behavior toward his girlfriend. Bella is the annoying girlfriend of Edward, who makes boring faces and talks shit. Jacob is a werewolf who is fortunately walking around with blue balls because he has a crush on a newborn baby.
They split the last part into two movies, trying to follow in footsteps of “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows”, and cash in as much as they could before the franchise ends. The only difference that “Breaking Dawn – Part 2” had from the previous film was the final 10-minute battle scene, otherwise both the movies had the same useless dialogue and boring romance.
However, stupid romance, a lousy script, talentless actors, cheap CGI, bad cinematography, and effortless direction could not help this franchise top our list. There’s one only movie that is even worse than those in the Twilight Saga, and still made a tremendous amount of money.
1. Fifty Shades of Grey (2015)
Box Office: $571 million RT Score: 25%
“Fifty Shades of Grey” was adapted from a book that was based on the fan-fiction of the Twilight Saga (seriously). The story follows a virgin woman named Anastasia Steele, who goes to interview, in the place of her friend, a very good-looking and successful businessman named Christian Grey. Here’s the “twist”: Christian Grey loves BDSM.
Why it’s terrible: The characters in this movie look very similar to the characters of the Twilight Saga, for obvious reasons. Christian Grey is an attractive man who wants to have entire control over his girlfriend, similar to Edward with Bella.
Anastasia Steele is an extremely conservative women who goes after her boyfriend no matter how badly he behaves with her. She can’t be happy without him and can’t decide what she even wants, similar to Bella.
The plot of this movie is so poor that it’s hard to understand how it managed to pass for a film. The two people coincidentally met each other, one a virgin in her mid-20s and the other a BDSM lover. The person who loves BDSM almost pressures the other to engage in this activity, and surprisingly, the other person who never had sex once in her entire life agrees to it.
Anastasia Steele decided to lose her virginity the moment a billionaire offered to take it. This has to be one of the worst portrayals of a woman in a movie that made more $500 million.
But feminists can’t blame men for it, because the story is inspired by a book written by a woman, the script was written by a woman, and even the film is directed by a woman. And guess what? The majority of audience was, in fact, women. If women have imaginations like this about themselves, then why blame men for everything?
Even if this was just a cheap erotic movie targeted toward sex addicts, it would have been fine and nobody would’ve judged it for that. But it tried so hard to convince you that it’s the best romantic movie you’ll ever watch, despite the fact that the lead actors have zero chemistry whatsoever. It’s not only the worst film that earned tons of money at the box office, but also one of the worst films ever made in Hollywood.
Author Bio: Khizar Hasen is a talented writer on TOC with an excessive knowledge and extreme love towards movies. He’s currently doing engineering in computer science. While he may not be the most educated writer on TOC, but he surely can provide some damn interesting stuff to read.