Top 5 Bad Movies

Alright, the list that no one but me has been waiting for: My Top 5 best bad movies of all time. Remember, there is a criteria and reason for the rankings. If you disagree with any ranking, you are simply wrong.

Before we get into the list, a quick story. I was flying to see my brother in Seattle and started chatting with a guy at the airport bar. He told me he worked for Starz, to which I replied, "Oh, you mean Nic Cage cable." He actually thought that was funny and we began to discuss why they play so many Nic Cage pictures on the network. Apparently Nic brings big ratings. Somethings just defy explanation.

Without further ado, to the list. (The Top 3 will be revealed at a later date, as this took me way longer than anticipated)

Honorable Mention:
8 MM;
Fast and Furious;
Con-Air;
Hard to Kill;
Broken Arrow;
Demolition Man;
and the hardest omission, Point Break. Point Break features two of the all time great bad actors dueling it out in between surfing, robbing banks and jumping out of planes. It was really hard leaving it out of the Top 5, but that just speaks to the strength of the rest of the list.



5. 2 Fast 2 Furious
Absurd leading man: Paul Walker. Walker delivers an absolutely magnificent performance as Brian O'Conner, a disgraced former Fed. It almost looks like he is reading cue cards off to the side of the screen. He has 0 charisma. He even walks funny. Next time it's on cable, check out his walk. It will change the way you watch the movie.

Meaningless conflict: Walker and his childhood buddy Tyrese must start running drugs for Cole Hauser's character who delivers a career ending performance. In one scene, they must evade the cops to deliver a package to Hauser that contains a cigar. Pretty sure that counts as meaningless.

Needlessly intense villian: As discussed above, Hauser fits the bill. He walks around in shirts unbuttoned to his navel and loves torturing people for no reason. In one scene he puts a rat under a bucket on a guy's chest, then takes a blow torch to the bucket to make the rat scratch the guy. As he's doing it, he laughs like a lunatic. He also walks around the whole time with a scowl and yells about people trying to take his money. It's fantastic. Plus he is almost certainly committing sex crimes on Eva Mendes' character for the duration of the movie.

Takes itself seriously: The movie had a huge budget, recognizable stars and has a minimal attempt to make jokes. Everything that happens has an important tone, even though it's all insanity.

Final Verdict: 2 Fast is a train wreck from start to finish, has horrible acting, no plot and more foolishness than I can detail. An immediate bad sign is that they couldn't even convince Vin Diesel to come back and reprise his role. It's not like he was doing anything of value at the time. But if it's on, I cannot change the channel.

4. Face/Off

Absurd leading man: Please, this has Nic Cage and John Travolta. The story is that Travolta is tracking super criminal Cage and must undergo a face transplant and body reconstruction to gain access to the prison where Cage's brother is being held to learn where a bomb is planted. They literally have to take his face.... off as Cage explains in one epic scene. Or more to the point, as the box of the DVD says, "In order to trap him. He must become him." Let's really take the time to digest this. The hypothesis is that it is possible to take Travolta's body, take Travolta's face off, put Cage's face on, then make Travolta's body the exact same as Cage's. Wow. But don't worry, they explain how it is possible in about 25 seconds. I can't remember it exactly, but it deals with some new special technology. (Which is always the answer; if that technology existed, every rich woman in the movie would look like Heidi Klum. Sounds good to me, get on it scientists).

Meaningless conflict: This is the weakness of the movie, since there is a bomb set in LA that could kill some number of people that I can't remember and don't care enough about to look up. Needless to say, if there weren't many civilian lives on the line, this would be a top 2 lock. But it does set up an essential part to a bad movie: only 3 people can know about what is going on. In this case, that Travolta has become Cage. So when Cage wakes up, he kills those 3 people and no one else knows what happened and they think that Cage is really Travolta. Confusing? Possibly. Awesome? No question.

Needlessly intense villian: Cage. Travolta. Both playing needlessly intense villains in the same film. Wrap your head around this one: Cage starts the movie doing Nic Cage things (i.e. awesome things like this), but then after the face transplant, it's supposed to be Cage acting like Travolta. And then we get Travolta acting like his body was inhabited by Cage. If you haven't seen it, do yourself a favor. It's so absurd and delightful.

Takes itself seriously: Once again, it had Cage and Travolta, two of the biggest stars in the world being directed by John Woo. It was clearly made as a legitimate film and is still funnier than the last 10 Adam Sandler movies combined.

Final Analysis: Too strange to believe and too wonderful to look away.

Stay tuned for the Top 3. Can anyone guess what it will be?